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Philosophy

Why The Universe Has The Order It Does

December 26, 2020 by admin

Careful experimental investigations have revealed a stable, underlying order to the principles which govern the motion of matter and energy in our universe – at least on the length scales in which we go about our daily lives. The Law of Gravity, Coulombs Law, Maxwell’s equations, etc., are just three examples of stable physical principles which we have discovered, through experiment and observation, to govern the interactions between different bodies of matter and fields of energy.

In this article we take a step back and ask the question:

Why are The Laws of Physics the way they are?

If we believe in a random universe, perhaps the kneejerk response might be that there doesn’t need to be a reason. But, as I will demonstrate in this blog article, the anthropic principle can be deployed very effectively to explain why many physical laws are as they are.

 

The Anthropic Principle

 

The Anthropic principle is very simple:

The environment that any conscious entity finds itself existing in must be somewhere it is favourable – or at least possible – for it to exist in.

The environment where a conscious entity developed must be somewhere it is possible for conscious entities to develop in.

Although this may be a self-evident, obvious fact, when this self-evident statement is rigorously considered, it is possible to use it to arrive at far-reaching conclusions.

For the anthropic principle to make any sense with respect to the laws of physics governing our universe, we must either appeal to:

  1. An intelligent designer
  2. A multiverse where the laws of physics that govern the various universes within it vary wildy (Ultimate Ensemble)

While an intelligent designer – that deliberately creates our one universe in such a manner so as to harbour life – on the surface may seem to make sense, it has the problem of answering one question (Why has the universe come to be the way it is?) by opening up an even bigger question (How did the intelligent designer come into existence and how did the intelligent designer come to be the way He is?)

The multi-verse interpretation of the anthropic principle rests on the idea that there are many, many, many universes (where a “universe” is used to describe everything that emerges from a given big-bang) that are formed from many, many, different big bangs all with different laws of physics and that the overwhelming majority of them harbour no sentient life but that, being sentient, we live in one of the few universes that does harbour conscious, sentient living creatures.

These multiple universes don’t interact with each other, either due to physical separation over vast distances, physical separation through dimensions where the interactive forces of the particles that compose them do not penetrate, or perhaps because the particle sets from each multiverse have separate “charge” and “force” categories, and interact with particles from the same universe, but have no effect on the motion of particles from any other universe but their own and hence are, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

Could existence really be that vast? The observable universe is 46 billion light years in diameter and the total universe may go on forever – at least in the four dimensions of spacetime that we are familiar with. Is it really possible that, on top of this, our one universe is just one member of a vast number of multiverses?

If we are to meaningfully apply the anthropic principle to the laws of physics while rejecting the existence of an intelligent designer (which raises as many questions as it answers) then we must accept the existence of a multiverse. This is because the laws of physics are uniform throughout our universe. Not only does Noether’s theorem, combined with the observed conservation of linear momentum demand this (as will be discussed later) but the fact that the observed spectra of distant galaxies billions of light years away have line emission patterns of the same elements that can be observed in a laboratory implies that the laws of physics are uniform across our universe.

This implies we need a multiverse, if we are to pick and choose which subset of physical laws are conducive to the evolution of life…

Is there a strong case for saying the laws of physics can be explained with the anthropic principle?

Read on to find out…

 

Evolution And Energy Conservation

 

The Law of Conservation of Energy states that the total energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. In other words, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but merely changed from one form into another.

Noether’s theorem shows that energy is conserved in physical systems whose laws do not vary with time.

Imagine we didn’t know that nuclear energy existed and we thought that the only forms of energy were potential energy, kinetic energy, heat energy and chemical energy. With only this knowledge, we then see the heat energy of a radioactive isotope spontaneously increasing.

We can either say:

1) This disproves the law of conservation of energy

or we can say

2) We have found a new source of energy

And then argue that the increase in heat energy coincides exactly with the reduction in nuclear energy and so energy is conserved.

What Noether’s theorem states is that, so long as the laws of physics remain constant with time, we can always state that energy is conserved through introducing new forms of energy to balance the books whenever energy appears to be created and that this approach is sound so long as we live in a repeatable universe where a given cause will always yield the same effect.

As an interesting aside, Noether’s theorem provides a bridge between physics and philosophy by reframing Hume’s problem of induction in terms of energy conservation.

At the heart of Hume’s induction problem was his conclusion that there was no a priori logical reason to conclude that just because any event occurred in a particular manner before, that things should occur in a similar manner in the future. In other words, Hume questioned the rational basis for assuming the repeatability of anything including the most fundamental physical processes.

…and in the absence of any presumption of any repeatability in anything at all, nothing can be predicted…

“For effect is totally different from cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second billiard ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or a piece of metal raised into the air and left without any support immediately falls; but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we can discover in the situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion in the stone or metal?” – David Hume (Limits of Metaphysical Speculation)

Framed in the terminology of physics, Hume’s problem of induction can be articulated as:

There is no fundamental a priori logical reason to believe that energy should be conserved.

Or is there?

Evolution is the process whereby complex structures, which are capable of performing complex functions, develop. In the absence of evolutionary processes, it is almost inconceivable that something as sophisticated as human consciousness could exist.

At its core, evolution is trial and error. You have a self-replicating information storage medium – DNA – that builds and modifies living creatures. These random modifications sometimes produce creatures that are better at surviving and reproducing and more often produces creatures that are worse. However, the creatures that are better at reproducing make more of themselves. This means their prevalence is far greater than their chance of emerging in the first place.

Evolution could be regarded as a gradual unconscious “learning process” where successful reproduction and death, gradually “teaches” the various evolving germlines how to produce phenotypes that are better at surviving and reproducing.

A key point is that each incremental change in structure, from generation to generation, is miniscule compared to the legacy information that each new generation inherits from the previous one. This legacy genome, that each new generation of living creatures inherits, represents information painstakingly gleaned from hundreds of millions of years of previous trial and error.

In order for evolution to advance and built more complex and capable creatures as time goes by, the “lessons” that germ lines previously “learned” through the process of natural selection must remain valid – to some extent – as time progresses, in order for the phenotypes to advance and further refine themselves.

If the basic laws of physics constantly changed, then all the information encoded in our DNA about how to build successful cells (let alone multi-cellular animals) would become obsolete at a rate which would be too fast for evolution to refine advanced multi-cellular organisms. That’s assuming life should sustain itself in any form – DNA itself might suddenly become impossible to chemically form. If the laws of physics constantly changed, the evolution of complex, advanced organisms would be like someone trying to build a skyscraper while someone else was routinely blowing up the foundations of that same skyscraper with dynamite.

The refinement and the advancement of phenotypes can only occur if previous functions “discovered” by evolution remain valid over evolutionary timescales.

Hence evolution and the corresponding development of advanced conscious structures with advanced cognitive functions can only occur in a universe where the laws of physics remain stable over evolutionary timescales and – hence – where energy is conserved over evolutionary timescales.

Einstein once said:

“The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility”

It should now be clear that the world is comprehensible because, at the most fundamental level, the process of learning (comprehension) and the process of evolution are basically the same – in that they both involve the accumulation of information. Thus, lifeforms could only evolve in a comprehensible universe where this is possible. The physicist James B. Hartle has also made this case.

Which, as has been previously mentioned, implies that energy is conserved as proved by Noether’s theorem.

 

Entropy

 

The second law of thermodynamics, that an isolated system left to itself will become more uniform and homogenous as time goes by ( which, if applied to energy, produces thermal equilibrium ) is pretty much logically unavoidable. Furthermore, the underlying principle of repeatability – which we discussed in the previous section as being necessary for evolution – implies an arrow of time. That cause A reliably, and repeatably, gives rise to effect B implies that, as time goes by there is a distinct preference for A to convert to B and not the reverse.

In the absence of irreversible processes, the world would be far less predictable (assuming it was predictable at all).

The ultimate purpose of all cognition (which is intimately linked to conscious experience) is to act on the world in order to realise certain preferred outcomes that would be unlikely to occur in the absence of such actions. All action, requires work and all work is ultimately generated by some kind of irreversible physical process.

An irreversible process can be regarded as a preference of our physical universe to the conversion of state A into state B over the conversion of state B into state A.

Perhaps the relationship between preference and entropy could even be regarded as the most fundamental way that conscious entities “negotiate” with the physical universe in which they exist to get what they want. (e.g. – “Hey Universe! I’ll let you convert diesel into water and CO2 if you let me build a skyscraper”)

The question is: In the absence of irreversible physical processes, could agents with distinct preferences exist, and – if so – what would be the underlying physical mechanism that would enable them to facilitate one preference over another?

Furthermore: In the absence of preferences and desires, could consciousness as we know it exist?

If not, then conscious creatures can only live in a universe where the second law of thermodynamics applies.

 

Conservation Of Linear And Angular Momentum

 

At the most fundamental level, structures are complex, somewhat ordered, arrangements of matter in space. We often talk about structures of language, structures of computer code, etc., etc., and while these structures seem highly abstract and detached from space, at the end of the day, if physical humans didn’t exist, language wouldn’t exist either. If physical computers didn’t exists in physical space, there would be nothing to execute the computer code.

In this sense:

All abstract, non-spatial structures, rely on the existence of spatial structures.

If consciousness as we know it ultimately relates to agency, in the sense that we think in order to do, then if all conscious entities are ultimately either spatial structures of some sort, or depend on spatial structures of some sort (as a simulation depends on the spatial existence of a computer), then it seems inconceivable that a conscious spatial entity could do anything in the world without moving. All action ultimately arises from spatial movement.

If we assume that both complex conscious agents:

  • Must move information to act upon the world (even plants produce seeds that move)
  • Their structural integrity and function depends on certain relationships of cause and effect remaining constant (i.e. to live, biochemical processes must occur predictably)

Then we arrive at the conclusion that, in any universe that harbours complex conscious agents, the laws of physics must remain constant in space as well as time.

And since Noether’s theorem proves that momentum must be conserved in any universe where the laws of physics are constant across space we must conclude that:

Momentum must be conserved in any universe inhabited by conscious agents capable of action.

In our case, if the laws of physics changed even slightly as we moved around the place then our finely-tuned, highly complex biochemistry would cease to function normally and we would die (or be reduced to a simpler, unconscious form of matter – as all the functional value gleaned from 100 millions of years of trial and error would be erased). However, this same statement would apply as equally to a computer as it would to a living organism, as the workings of computers are also finely tuned to the energy levels of semi-conductors and if the laws of physics changed – even slightly – computers would also be rendered functionless.

Extrapolating this principle to angular momentum is simple: any complex action, that does not ultimately destroy a complex structure, requires rotation.

Without rotation the complex structure can only go forward and backward, like a bullet. Furthermore, the entire structure would need to be frozen in place. The only alternative is that the structure itself effectively explodes. If the components of a structure move in divergent trajectories then unless they turn around at some point, the structure will become progressively more tenous until it becomes a cloud of fragments.

Hence:

If we assume that both complex conscious agents:

  • Must rotate parts of their body to engage in complex activities
  • Their structural integrity and function depends on certain relationships of cause and effect remaining constant (i.e. to live, biochemical processes must occur predictably)

Then we arrive at the conclusion that, in any universe that harbours complex conscious agents, the laws of physics must be rotationally invariant.

In other words, the fundamental physical laws that profoundly affect the biochemical processes in your body can’t change just because you’ve turned around.

Again:

Since Noether’s theorem proves that angular momentum must be conserved in any universe where the laws of physics are rotationally invariant we must conclude that:

Angular momentum must be conserved in any universe inhabited by conscious agents capable of action.

Anyone unconvinced by the argument that rotation is necessary for complex action should consider that rotation is also necessary for orbits, which in turn are necessary for complex stable structures – as I will explain later.

 

Gravity And Electromagnetism

 

Of the four fundamental forces, I will refrain from discussing the strong and weak forces as they are both complicated and short range and instead, I will limit myself to explaining why gravity and the electromagnetic forces have the form that they do as these are the only two forces whose spatial affects extent across the length scales over which living processes occur.

The mathematical form of Newton’s Universal Law of gravitation is:

Where:

F, is the force in Newtons

M, is the larger Mass in kilograms

m, is the smaller mass in kilograms

r, is the distance seperating the center of mass of both objects

G, is the gravitational constant

While the mathematical form of the law that governs the strength of force between two electromagnetic charges in a vacuum, known as Coloumb Law is:

Where:

F, is the force in Newtons

Q, is the larger Charge in Coulombs

q, is the smaller charge in Coulombs

r, is the distance seperating the center of charge of both objects

, is a constant of interaction composed of other constants including π and ε0 is the permitivity of free space.

We might now ask:

  • Why does the equation governing these two Force have the form that it has?
  • Why are two completely distinct forces described by very similar equations?
  • Why is the force proportional to the product of both masses as opposed to some other relation such as, say, the sum?
  • Why are both forces proportional to the inverse squared of the distance between the objects in question?

The fact that both gravitation and Coloumb’s Law, are both proportional to the product of the charges and masses of the objects exerting force on each other, respectively, follows from the repeatable nature of the universe. i.e. from the fact that identical charges or masses an identical distance away from each other will exert an identical force on each other.

This logically follows from the fact that we inhabit a repeatable universe where similar initial conditions give rise to similar outcomes.

To understand how this follows logically, imagine two very light bags, a distance, r, from each other where the size of the bag is negligably small compared to the distance between the bags. We fill these bags with identical balls, mass m, where m is much heavier than the mass of the bags. Because the balls are identical – and because the universe is repeatable – each ball is attracted to each identical ball in the other bag by exactly the same force. Now draw a line that links each ball in bag A to each ball in bag B. If each line represents the force that each ball is attracted to each other ball, the total number of lines will be the total gravitational force of attraction between bag A and bag B.

It is clear that the total number of lines linking the 2 bags is equal to the product of the number of balls in each of the bags.

Number of lines = (Balls in Bag A) X (Balls in Bag B)

The relationship between the multiple of the Gravitational force between two bags containing different numbers of balls as a multiple of the gravitational force between two balls.

This logic explains equally well why the electromagnetic force between two objects is equal to the product of their charges as it does as to why the gravitational force between two objects is equal to the product of their masses.

The fact that gravity and the electromagnetic force decrease with the square of the distance is less straightforward to explain. For a simple radiant body, the decrease in luminosity with the inverse square of the distance follows simply from the conservation of energy. If a point source radiates so much energy uniformly in all directions, then the flow of energy through a given surface area pointing normally in the direction of the flux, will vary inversely with the square of the distance simply because the area of the shell surrounding the light source increases with the square of the distance and, hence the fraction of the shell that a given surface area represents is the inverse square of the distance.

Gravitation and the electrostatic force do not radiate net energy. However, all force interactions are mediated through carrier particles, so if we imagine an object emitting virtual photons (the carrier particle for the electromagnetic force) or gravitons (the carrier particle for gravity) then, so long as they are emitted evenly in all directions, this would also produce an inverse squared law. And now we invoke rotational symmetry and the law of conservation of angular momentum, from further back in this article, to guarantee there is no angular dependence to either of these forces.

 

Why Space Has 3 Dimensions

 

I will finish this article with an explanation as to why space has 3-dimensions. When I say “space” I mean, the theatre in which life takes place. The anthropic principle can only be applied to the framework in which living, conscious entities develop and exist and, because of this, the existence of extra hidden dimensions postulated by some theories wrapped up tightly over plank length scales that are too small to impact anything we do or observe has no bearing on this matter.

The central importance of the orbit to the existence of life is a key fact to be aware of when considering the underlying reason why space is 3 dimensional.

  1. For a spatial structure to exist, there must be some stable relationship between the different spatial components from which it is composed. (And all information storage, ultimately depends in some way on the stability of a spatial structure which serves as a storage medium)
  2. For a spatial structure to be created, it must also be possible to adjust the relationship between the spatial components of adjacent structures (and replication/reproduction necessarily requires the ability to change the physical universe)

You may be interested to know that for a universe with a whole number of dimensions both conditions 1) and 2) only apply in a 3-Dimensional universe.

The importance of the orbit is that it imposes a stable relationship between the particles orbiting each other. It allows the stable formation of atoms, which can then have net dipoles and stick to each other with hydrogen bonds, ionic bonds or Van Der Waals forces. None of these higher order chemical effects could take place without atoms that are mostly neutral, but which “stick” to each other if they get close enough at a low enough temperature.

I will refrain from trying to derive things like the Pauli Exclusion principle, or quantized energy levels from the anthropic principle! I don’t know if this is possible, but, if it is, I’m personally not smart enough to do it!

Suffice to say that a balance between attraction and repulsion, on which solid spatial structures depend, requires a stable spatial relationship between two different particles – a stable relationship that can only be maintained by one particle orbiting the other.

From straighforward geometric considerations the acceleration, a, associated with circular motion is:

Where:

a, is the centripedal accelation

v, is the velocity

r, is the orbital radius

Given that the formula for angular momentum, L, is:

Where, m, is the smaller orbiting mass (where we assume a small mass orbits a much larger one).

Substituting L for  v, gives:

And since:

Then we can express force in terms of angular momentum, mass and radius:

Lets substitute the force of gravity in for F, although the electromagnetic force would work just as well since the point of this exercise is to express the angular momentum of a stable orbit in terms of the orbital radius. Also the expression for gravity will be generalized for an N dimensional universe. Assuming conservation of flux yields:

Where, N, is the number of spacial dimensions.

Substituting F, on both sides yields:

If the dimensions of space are 3 or less, angular momentum increases with orbital radius, if space had 4 dimensions, angular momentum would be constant with orbital radius, if space had 5 or more dimensions, angular momentum would go down as the orbital radius increased.

Orbital energy, as a function of radius is the integral of force with respect to distance:

Again, N, is the number of spatial dimensions in the universe.

Note that for a 2 dimensional universe, the formula is:

We can see from this, that in a universe with 2 dimensions or less, as the orbital radius approaches infinity, the orbital energy also approaches infinity. In otherwords, in a universe with 2 dimensions or less, there is no such thing as escape velocity. One particle can never gain enough energy to escape the orbit of the particles it’s orbiting around!

Thus, in a universe with 2 or less dimensions, condition 2) the reconfiguration of matter and, hence, the ability of structures to reproduce themselves is not satified.

When space has three or more dimension, however, the orbital energy approaches a finite limit at infinite radius. Hence, in a universe with 3 dimensions or more each orbit has a well defined escape energy, or escape velocity which, if reached, allows the smaller orbiting particle to escape the orbit of the larger particle.

When we apply torque to a particle, we also add energy to that particle and if the universe has 3 or more dimensions, this extra energy results in the orbital radius increasing. In a universe with 3 dimensions, this is no problem, as both orbital angular momentum and orbital energy both increase with orbital radius. However, if the universe has 4 or more spatial dimensions then the orbital angular momentum reduces with increased radius. In practice, what this means is that the orbit is unstable. The slightest nudge or the addition of the tiniest amount of energy to an orbiting particle in a universe with 4 or more dimension would destabilize the orbit.

Paul Ehrenfest and Max Tegmark have proved that 3 spatial dimensions are necessary for stable orbits more rigorously.

In conclusion:

  • Stable orbits cannot exist in a universe with 4 or more spatial dimensions (eliminating the possibility of information storage in a structure)
  • Particles cannot escape their orbits in a universe with 2 or less spatial dimensions (eliminating the possibility of reproduction)
  • Reproducing, evolving organisms can only exist in a 3 dimensional universe

 

Conclusion

 

Perhaps these aspects of our universe that appear to be especially favourable to the evolution of life may convince you that the universe we see around us is the result of the anthropic principle at work.

This would in turn imply, that the entire universe whose immense vastness we see around us is but a tiny spec in a mind-bogglingly infinite multiverse who’s sheer scale and diversity is completely impossible for our limited minds to comprehend.

However, our universe is comprehensible, because evolution can only occur in a comprehensible universe. Evolution also favours entities that can act effectively on their environment, and since comprehension increase the effectiveness with which an organism can act on its environment, it is, all else being equal, a trait favoured by evolution. So evolution can only occur in a comprehensible universe and it also has a tendency to (eventually) produce phenotypes that can comprehend it.

Are you convinced?

 

John McCone

Filed Under: Blog, Philosophy Tagged With: Anthropic, Laws of Physics, Noether, Order of Universe, Universe

Containment or Bust

March 16, 2020 by admin

Flattening The Curve Is Not Enough – Containment Is The Only Non-Catastrophic Option

 

AlexLMX/shutterstock.com

There’s been a lot of talk about “flattening the curve”, reducing the rate of infections so that hospitals can give every case the treatment that is required. Yet if we believe the attack rates of 60 to 80 percent estimated by experts as well as the fraction of 20% as the number of patients that require hospital care, quoted in the WHO report along with the 3-6 week recovery time – then allowing the virus to “burn through” the population at any rate is disastrous.

In a business as usual scenario, the number of COVID-19 cases seem to double, roughly every 4 to 5 days. Since critical cases take 3-6 weeks to recover, then to “flatten the curve” enough to allow a significant reuse of hospital capacity for new cases, as previous cases recover, you would really need to extend the doubling time from 4 or 5 days – out to 3 or 4 months. To drastically reduce R0 enough to lengthen the doubling time from 4 or 5 days to 3 or 4 months (the minimum period to achieve substantial recycling of medical equipment) would require extreme non-pharmaceutical interventions.

This raises the question: If we are going to take extreme measures to drastically reduce the R0 of COVID-19, why not go those extra few yards and really try and push the R0 of the virus below 1, so that the majority of people never have to get infected?

But even flattening the curve out for 3 or 4 months isn’t enough. On the 12th March Lombardy had 8,725 cases and already the hospitals there were overwhelmed. If we assumed Lombardy’s hospitals have the capacity to deal with the intensive care patients that are produced by 8,725 cases from COVID-19 (which they clearly aren’t) then, given the population of the Lombardy region is 10 million, and assuming each intensive care patient requires 3 weeks of care, in order to “manageably burn through” all the COVID-19 cases in Lombardy, there could only be 8,725 new COVID-19 infections every 3 weeks. This means, assuming, 6 million people in Lomabardy end up catching it, COVID-19 would need to take at least 2,063 weeks to burn through the population of Lomabardy in order to be manageably handled by the hospitals and ensure that every serious patient is adequately cared for. That’s about 40 years!!!!

Joscha Bach has written an article that elaborates this point in detail.

A peer reviewed quantitative analysis by Imperial College has also arrived at the conclusion that, even during a flattened curve scenario, hospitals will be completely overwhelmed.

In order to “flatten the curve” enough for COVID-19 to take 40 years to “manageably infect” the entire population of the world, its R0 would have to be reduced from about 3 to a hair’s breadth higher than 1.

And if we are going to go to all the hassle of changing the way we do things to bring the R0 of COVID-19 all the way down from 3 to 1, we may as well put in the extra effort to push it below 1, and properly contain it, so that cases cycle down to zero and only a small fraction of the population get infected.

For all these reasons, “flattening the curve” is not an acceptable outcome, we must either contain COVID-19, or face catastrophe.

There are six stages of awareness:

  1. Denial
  2. Anger
  3. Bargaining
  4. Fear
  5. Depression
  6. Acceptance

The belief that “all we need to do is flatten the curve, then our hospitals will be able to successfully treat all the cases” is a part of the irrational bargaining phase. It’s the idea that we won’t have to be as strict as China, we won’t need lockdowns, mass quarantines, and masks, we just need to wash our hands a bit, and give people few few elbow bumps so the disease progresses sufficiently slowly through the population to enable our hospitals to cope and then everything will more or less be fine.

Unfortunately the numbers in both Italy and China do not support this view. COVID-19 overloads healthcare systems even when a tiny fraction, less than 0.1%, of the regional population gets infected, due to the intense, expensive, treatments required by serious COVID-19 patients which utilize scarce resources. There is no way to “manageably infect” 80% of the nation with COVID-19 – on any remotely realistic timescale.

Right now most people are in denial. We are constantly reassured that most cases are “mild.” It’s worth mentioning that “mild” means fever and possibly recoverable pneumonia, while “severe” and “critical” means likely death without medical attention.

If you feel reassured by an 80% chance that you won’t require urgent medical attention in the next few months, I’ve got a game you might enjoy playing: it’s called Russian Roullette.

Furthermore, the mortality rate of 1-2% is with medical attention. If the hospiitals get overloaded the death rate will likely be higher. This article conservatively estimates, after looking at several real world examples of existing health systems that were overwhelmed, that about 4% of people who catch it will die. And if 70% of the total world’s population get infected by COVID-19, as some experts estimate, then 2.8% of the world’s population will be killed by COVID-19 in the absence of containment.

To put that in perspective, 3.55% of the world’s population were killed during the 6 years of World War II.

Unless we can contain COVID-19, it will kill a similar fraction of people, over the next few months, as World War II killed over the course of 6 years.

And since the disease is brand new, we don’t yet know how long those who recover from it will remain immune. It’s not inconceivable that, in the absence of containment, new strains will emerge every year or two and take out another 3% of the world’s population every couple of years (well, given people will likely have some immunity it might be closer to 0.5-1% in subsequent years).

It’s also worth mentioning that there is no assurance that a vaccine will be available in 18 months. 18 months is quoted as the absolute minimum timeframe that a vaccine could be made available to the general public, but as Dr. Bruce Aylward pointed out in a press conference, we are really bad at making vacines that are effective against coronaviruses. There’s currently no safe and effective vaccine for SARS, MERS or the common cold. So, pessimistically, a vaccine could easily be as long as a decade away.

Since:

  1. “Flattening the curve” to keep COVID-19 cases at a level hospitals can cope with is no easier than containment
  2. A vaccine may be up to a decade away

Containment, hard though it may be, might be the only way to avoid suffering the same kind of yearly death count that people suffered through during world war 2, year after year, as new strains of this deadly version of the common cold come back to sweep across the world, slaughtering the elderly in their wake, over and over again for the next decade.

Even a single wave of COVID-19 could knock out 10-30% of the those in their late career and early retirement (in a scenario where hospitals get overloaded), and if we sustain subsequent yearly waves of slightly different strains of this disease, each subsequent wave might pick off another 5-10% of those who are retired or approaching retirement.

In a previous article I wrote, I explained how the loss of the elder generation would have a disastrous impact on the whole economy due to the role which older members of society play in both organizing our social institutions and there disproportionately high role in industries lower down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which produce the necessities of life and sustains necessary infrastructure.

This plague will not just “go away on it’s own.” It will not go away unless we make it go away.

The sooner we face this stark reality, the less people will die.

 

Containing COVID-19 Will Be Incredibly Difficult – And Will Require Absolute Determination

 

COVID-19 is more infectious than the flu. This should gives us some idea of how difficult it will be to contain.

Indeed, the only reason for us to hold out any hope that COVID-19 may be contained is the fact that it is sufficiently deadly to induce massive behavioural changes in people seeking to avoid it – unlike flus and colds.

Endemic diseases, such as smallpox, have been contained in the past. And it’s worth mentioning that the R0 of smallpox is larger than that of COVID-19 so, with sufficient will, the containment of COVID-19, should in theory still be possible.

Quarantine and drastic social distancing has an equivalent effect to vaccination.

The big difference between COVID-19 and smallpox is that there is a vaccine for smallpox while there is no vaccine for COVID-19. And quarantine is far more economically expensive than vaccination. On the plus side, remote communication technology and data analysis have never been more advanced.

I think a lot of politicians and business men, who think that “we simply can’t afford to bring our economy to a standstill in order to contain this virus”, have not really thought through what 4% of their country’s population dying (and especially, once the hospitals fail, what 10-20% of people in their late careers dying including politicians, celebrities, CEOs, court judges, nuclear power plant engineers, etc.,) over the course of a few months, actually looks like in real life.

At some point, things will get so bad, that the leaders of our nations (assuming they haven’t died of COVID-19) will be forced to take all the extreme measures they were previously afraid would harm the economy, anyway, and – since the number of infected will be much larger – they will be forced to implement these containment measure on a wider scale, over a more protracted period, and do more economic harm, than would have occurred if they had implemented them earlier on.

Sooner or later, when they see the unacceptable, horrific effects of this killer virus ripping through the country, and the widespread devastation it reeks on real people and real families, politicians will, sooner or later, take extreme measures in an attempt to contain it – when it really hits us hard in a months or two, there will be no other alternative.

One way or another, the economy is screwed.

Our only choice at this point is: do we want to damage the economy earlier on, and damage it less, or damage it later on, and damage it far more?

And I might add, that there is no reason to believe that once COVID-19 infects the entire population, it will be “over and done with.” This again, is just another example of a hope that we are clinging onto and repeating as a mantra in order to avoid a sense of absolute despair… a hope that may not be true. The more people COVID-19 infects, the more the virus will evolve and diverge into a menagerie of different strains. And even after everyone gets infected once, new strains could infect – and kill – people over and over again, year after year. This wouldn’t be unprecedented, the black death continuously killed people in large numbers over a period of 4 years straight from 1347 to 1351. For 3 years straight, between 1862-1864 a plague of smallpox infected the Haida population over and over again and eventually killed 90% of them.

We don’t need hope. We need ACTION!

We NEED containment.

We might not succeed. But this is no reason not to try. This is no reason not to throw everything we have into trying to contain this rapidly developing plague.

Karolis Kavolelis/shutterstock.com

If COVID-19 spreads uncontrollably, the number of people it will kill per capita will be comparable to the number killed during the bloodiest war in the 20th century. A total of 200 million people are likely to die within a matter of months, that’s 20 times the number of people who were killed during the holocaust – if new strains evolve and continue to infect us year-on-year, maybe more. Today the number of deaths outside China continues to climb exponentially, increasing 10-fold every 2 weeks; 100-fold every month. And yet politicians, and the general public of many countries, seem resigned to allowing this virus to overcome their respective nation’s. Imagine if a foreign army invaded the borders of your nation and, when the leader of your nation spoke to you, he said the following:

“Because it will be very hard to stop this invading army – and because resisting would interfere too much with your lifestyles – we have decide to bargain a delayed surrender with our foe. By surrendering in this way, we will the flatten out the invasion and ensure it occurs gradually, in a more managed way, rather than suddenly. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry, the general of the enemy army has promised he won’t torture 80% of you by filling your lungs with water for 3 to 6 weeks, and even if you are one of the unlucky one’s who get tortured, there’s at least an 80% chance you won’t die on average. Indeed, as an added incentive for those of fighting age to capitulate peacefully, the invading horde has promised to torture and kill less than 1 in 100 of you, and will mainly focus on butchering 1 in 5 of your parents and elders. So there’s really no reason to worry, no cause for alarm at all. The most important thing is that we cheerily accept this invasion, look on the bright side, and above all, don’t panic.”

What would we think of a leader who gave his people such a speech during a time of crisis? What opinion would we have of a people who meekly accepted such a fate?

However, because COVID-19 is incredibly infectious, we only have a chance of containing it by simultaneously throwing everything we have at it.

 

Throwing Everything At Containing COVID-19

 

There are four things that can slow down the spread of COVID-19:

  • Early detection and quarantine
  • Social Distancing, Hygiene and PPE
  • Strategic closure of borders
  • Hot weather

The number of confirmed cases in hot equatorial countries, and countries South of the equator, seem to be growing more slowly than than the number of confirmed cases in medium and high latitudes north of the equator. This paper seems to espouse the hypothesis that there is a narrow band of temperatures and humidities in which COVID-19 can rapidly spread. Given the exploding cases in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, I’m not convinced of the low temperature limit. But there does seem to be a fairly consistent trend of COVID-19 cases growing more slowly in countries where the temperature is higher.

I must emphasis that temperature only seems to slow the rate of growth temperature alone will not push the number of into decline (as we can see from the fact that case numbers are steadily growing in hotter climates – just more slowly) unless it is accompanied by other, aggressive measures to reduce the virus’s rate of spread.

The active measures that we can deploy to push the virus into decline are:

  • Test everyone with a fever for COVID-19
  • Test everyone who contacted someone else who tested positive for COVID-19 within the last 2 weeks
  • Quarantine all positive cases, and all contacts of positive cases, until they test negative
  • Foster a National Ethic of social distancing and general hygiene, at an individual and institutional level, as a matter of Civic Duty
  • Evaluate the R0 of every institution in the country (company, charity, municipal government office, etc., etc.,) and order the mandatory closure of every unnecessary institution whose R0 exceeds 1 (in the event that one COVID-19 case is found)
  • Ensure that no households contain cohabitants that commute to two or more separate workplaces, for the duration of the pandemic
  • Concentrate PPE on necessary workers in jobs that are potentially major vectors of spread (in the absence of PPE and appropriate training)
  • Continue to aggressively develop better COVID-19 tests which:
    • Require less skill to operate
    • Give faster results
    • Give more reliable results
    • Are cheaper and easier to mass produce
    • …and import the state of the art tests from whatever producers are the market leaders in this respect
  • Mobilise national effort to increase PPE production

  • Test 1-in-100 people who enter the country for COVID-19, force every traveller from any country that yields a positive test, to pay to have themselves tested for COVID-19 as a condition of entry and close the border with any country where more than 1 entrant in 1000 tests positive for COVID-19
  • Train armies of volunteers to:
    • Test people for COVID-19
    • Contact trace
    • Manufacture PPE
    • Deliver necessary good to facilitate social distancing and reduce crowding in shops (i.e. the timely delivery of food supplies to one’s door)
  • Ensure a sufficient stay-at-home allowance for:
    • Everyone who is quarantined
    • Everyone whose job is unnecessary, and whose workplace has an empirically measured R0 greater than one and who cannot reasonably work from home
    • Whose skill set and career choice is most suited to applying for unnecessary jobs that would tend to spread the outbreak
    • Is sick with a mild case of COVID-19
  • Give people the option to join “closed pandemic households.” Some people are happy living alone, others become desperately lonely. For those who live alone but get lonely without human contact, facilitate the formation of “closed pandemic households”, households of people who live together (but perhaps would otherwise live alone) who interact freely with each other, but don’t physically interact with anyone else outside the household – closed pandemic households must not exceed 5 members – members of the household must ensure that they, and every other member, does not expose themselves to any risk of infection.
  • Ensure that the process of transporting people into a closed pandemic household is secure and involves a very low risk of infection for both the driver, and the passenger (where both driver and passenger have self-isolated for 2 weeks and tested negative for COVID-19 and that the car has been wiped down with bleach etc., etc.,) 

What all these measures contribute to is to:

  1. Reduce the spread of the disease by infected individuals per unit time (social distancing, hand hygiene, use of masks, gloves, PPE, disinfecting surfaces, opening windows to disperse any viruses in aerosol form, lowering the lid on toilets before flushing, drying hands with disposable paper rather than using blow dryer to avoid aerosolizing any virus on hands)
  2. Reducing the time infected individuals can spread the virus (Early detection and quarantine)

Imagine a weed that grows in the soil and produces seeds from which other weeds grow. The less fertile the soil; the slower it grows. Social distancing is like lowering the fertility of the soil. Detection and quarantine is like a team of gardeners which wander around the plot rooting out weeds as well picking the seeds dispersed by those weeds.

It’s now worth elaborating on some of these measures.

 

What Does Social Distancing Mean?

 

Social distancing means minimising your interactions between everyone outside of a fixed household of people where each person in the household also minimises their interaction with others outside of the household. If there is one weak link in the household, one member of the household, who does not minimise their interactions with people outside the household then the ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD is likely to get infected.

The only interactions that may be necessary with those outside a household is:

  1. Necessary work that cannot be conducted without leaving the household
  2. Collecting delivered goods

If no one has necessary work which they must perform outside the household, then, so long as everyone remains in the house or in the garden, and no one leaves and exposes themselves – and, consequently, the entire household to contamination – then, for the most part, everyone can relax, and collecting delivered goods is only activity that involves any risk.

  • All the surfaces of delivered goods should be wiped down with bleach
  • Ideally delivery-men should drop the goods outside the door and then leave. Confirmation of receipt should be conducted by phone or some kind of remote messaging system, signing on receipt should be eliminated
  • All the surfaces of delivered goods should be wiped down with bleach
  • Delivered goods should be taken to a specially allocated decontamination room (or decontamination cupboard) and left there for 10 days, as coronaviruses can remain activated (alive) on surfaces outside the body for that long.
  • After carrying goods to decontamination room, gloves should be dipped in bleach
  • All surfaces touched by gloves while moving the package to the decontamination room should be wiped down
  • Possibly wipe down path walked to decontamination room, or lay newspaper, or something else, along this path which can then be disposed of or put in a washing machine
  • Better to buy in bulk and infrequently, than order small frequent deliveries

When taking out the trash, gloves and homemade masks should be worn, gloves should be dipped in bleach after re-entering house, soles of shoes should be dipped in bleech outer clothing should be washed.

If nobody in the household goes out to work, staying uninfected should really be that simple.

Dr. John Campell has made many Youtube video where he has discussed general hygiene and social distancing at length along with many issues surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak

If an individual must go outside to perform necessary work, that individual should either:

  1. Ideally Live alone
  2. Live in a household where no one else works
  3. Live in a household where all the inhabitants work in the same workplace

If more than one household member works and each member works at a different workplace, that living arrangement opens up a workplace – household – workplace – household chain of transmission where different workplaces can be infected through the path of co-habiting households.

Essential workers that share a household with someone else who goes out to work should consider changing their living arrangements to either live alone, or move in with someone who works in the same work place, for the duration of the pandemic.

While working, workers who do not share the same household, should stay a few meters away from each other unless the nature of their work specifically demands otherwise. If there is a relatively low risk of infection workers should wear:

  1. Plastic Gloves (unless the job calls for delicate finger work) which are washed frequently, and in the case of delicate fingerwork that requires the absence of gloves, to wash your hands frequently
  2. Homemade facemasks ( Effective at reducing the degree that infected individuals are contagious to others – since people can spread the virus before they know they are infected, everyone should wear a homemade face mask)

If the risk is high, more PPE should be used as appropriate.

Workers should avoid public transport and, if possible, travel to work by car. If said worker does not own a car, then said worker should get regularly get a lift with the same co-worker everyday.

The workplace should be run in a similar manner to the household in the sense of minimizing contact with outsiders. Extra care should be given to interactions with both customers and suppliers. Avoid and minimize personal interactions between both customers and suppliers, if possible, as these (in addition to publiic transport) are routes whereby infections can enter your workplace.

Sick employees with COVID-19-like symptoms should immediately self-isolate, be tested for COVID-19, and be given sick pay.

When coming back from work, and re-entering the household, the soles of your shoes should be dipped in bleach and then taken off. Your gloves should be dipped in bleach, then used to removed your outer clothing, which should be immediately washed.

If at all possible, do not carry your smartphone outside your household, if you need to as part of work, disinfect it with a disinfectant wipe.

If one or more members of a household works, then unlike a situation where the entire household is fully isolated, the other members of the household would be advised to keep a distance, wear masks and disinfect surfaces in the house regularly.

Does all this sound hard?

If it does, consider this: Just over a century ago, people were prepared to spend 4 years in the trenches, up to their knees in mud, getting shot at, shelled and attacked with poison gas, tormented by rats and lice where they developed trench-foot and frostbite which for many, required amputations.

What would the soldiers of past generations, who sacrificed their lives in war to protect their countrymen, think of us if we fail to rise to this challenge? What would the soldiers of World War 1 and previous generations think of us if, by failing to act, we allow millions of our fellow countrymen to die, and release a plague upon the world that could revisit us for years to come, just because staying at home for four months or so in a well-heated suburban house with running water, home entertainment systems and plentiful food delivered to our door was “too large a sacrifice” for us to make???

 

Social Distancing As A Civic Duty

 

When case numbers are low, either at the start of an epidemic, or at the end of a successful containment effort, the chances of any one person catching the disease is minimal so, from the point of view of self-protection, any one person is fairly safe without engaging in social distacing or taking precautions.

But here is the important point:

Precautions, during an epidemic, are not solely to protect oneself, they are to protect society.

When you stay at home and don’t contact people with the exception of economically necessary work, if you wear a mask, if you disinfect surfaces, then you are contributing to reduce the R0 of the virus throughout the population. If everyone does their bit, and practices social distancing, the R0 of the entire society will be much lower.

With a lower R0:

  • Clusters, once detected, will be smaller and more manageable
  • If everyone has less contacts, this will make contact tracing much easier and much more straightforward

For this reason, at the early stages of a pandemic, self-isolation, wearing masks and gloves, generally keeping a distance from people can be regarded as a civic virtue, even if the chances of getting infected are less than 1 in a million, every person who isolates, distances, or practices good hygiene contributes to making quarantine and containment that much simpler, easier and more probable – so long as they continue to perform any economically necessary role that is associated with their careers.

Large concentrations of virus particles have been measured in asymptomatic individuals there are good reasons to believe that those infected with COVID-19 may be contagious long before (1-14 days) they have symptoms. And even longer before those symptoms become extreme enough to be clear that its not a normal flu.

So because we can’t know who is contagious, the only way for society as a whole to slow the contagion down is for the entire poplation in a region, where an outbreak is discovered, to practice social distancing – the instant 1 person is found to have the COVID-19 virus. Even if only 1 person in a million carries the virus during a local outbreak, in order to slow the infection rate and contain the outbreak, the full million out of a million must immediately do their bit and start practicing social distancing. Not to protect themselves – but to protect society, because we know that while the chances of infection today may be one in a million. If we don’t all socially distance ourselves and practice hygiene today, the chance of getting infected by this potentially deadly virus and transmitting it to our loved ones will grow exponentially as time passes.

At this stage, COVID-19 can only be contained in non-authoritarian countries if everyone practices social distancing to the maximum extent possible.

In all honesty, the social distancing I described in the previous section is pretty extreme. And if everyone, uniform practiced a lower standard of social distancing and hygiene, then it would still probably be possible to contain the virus.

The problem is there will always be some irresponsible idiots out there. So if we want to successfully contain the virus, the rest of us will have to take extra-extreme measures to ensure that the aggregate R0 of society – idiots included – is less than 1.

Large scale compliance with voluntary social distancing, and both encouraging others to practice it and reprimanding those who don’t in the informal civil sphere, are both essential in order for non-authoritarian societies to protect their freedoms. The right to life, is obviously more important than the freedom to roam around and do what you want. And if it is necessary to pass draconian legislation to save lives, then so be it. But if everyone voluntarily cooperates and does their duty, we can contain the virus without the need to pass authoritarian legislation, which, once on the books is often difficult to remove.

 

Face Masks?

 

There is some controversy about average people wearing masks outside. This is due to the fact that many countries currently have an insufficient stock of masks and the governments of many countries have discouraged citizens from wearing surgical masks for fear that health-workers might not have access to them.

Masks have been shown to reduce people’s likelihood of catching the flu by 80% when accompanied by hand washing. However this experiment didn’t include a control group who just washed their hands without using a mask, so it may be that washing hands without a mask may offer the same protection.

However, it is generally accepted that face masks are effective at reducing the extent to which you are contagious to others. The CDC in the U.S. advises that sick members of a household be equipped with face masks to reduce their chances of infecting the healthy members.

So if everyone wore a surgical mask, then everyone would be more protected, although that protection would come primarily in the form of people who are incubating the disease unknowingly infecting others less by wearing masks as opposed to people who wear masks catching it less (a normal face mask does not significantly protect the wearer – while a respirator makes breathing more difficult).

The big issue with wearing face masks is that stocks are low and must be conserved for hospitals and the like. For that reason, purchasing commercially available facemasks, at this stage, does not aid the COVID-19 containment effort.

However, it is actually quite easy to make your own face mask from common, readily available, household items, here is a good video with clear instructions on how to do this.

It is also important to know how to hygienically put on and remove your face mask, as there is a right way to do this which prevent infection and wrong ways to do it that increase the risk of infection. This one-and-a-half-minute-long video tells you how to do it the right way.

Homemade face masks will both reduce the transmissivity of people who unknowingly carry COVID-19, without consuming valuable commercial facemask supplies. So wearing a homemade face mask if you have to be in a public place does contribute to the overall containment effort.

Strict social distancing and staying at home is massively more effective, and face masks should not be viewed as an alternative to social distancing, nor should they be regarded as making the wearer immune from infection (they don’t) instead they should be used in the context of economically necessary activities that require physical proximity to other people or the use of shared spaces.

 

Massive Testing And Quarantine

 

Quarantining everyone who test positive for COVID-19 at the earliest possible occasion is the surest way to reduce the spread of this disese. Testing the entire population of a country on a weekly basis for COVID-19, is impactical. However, according to the WHO report 87.9% of patients with COVID-19 develop a fever. Thus, given that clusters of infections contain many individuals, if everyone in the country that developed a fever was tested for COVID-19 then every COVID-19 infection cluster across the entire country could be identified within about 2 weeks.

The problem here is that people are infectious before they develop fevers. However, by combining the comprehensive testing of everyone with a fever, as a means of identifying the infection clusters with contact tracing and the testing all the other contacts, all the members of the cluster can be quarantined promptly. Hopefully, as testing procedures become better and better, it will be possible to ascertain whether people are infected before they are contagious.

If this approach is combined with the ubiquitous recognition by every member of the community that social distancing is a civic duty (even when the risk of infection to any one individual is very low), clusters will be smaller, contact tracing will be simpler and easier, and it should be possible to contain every one of the outbreak clusters. If the testing methods are not sufficiently well-developed to deliver a reliable positive result prior to an individual becoming infectious, it may be necessary to quarantine all contacts for at least a few days until a reliable negative result can be obtained. It may even be necessary to quarantine contacts of contacts. By using an approach to quarantine of “COVID-positive until proven COVID-negative” the containment of clusters is guaranteed.

Everyone quarantined should be quarantined in isolation. People suspected of being infected with COVID-19 should not be quarantined together lest one of them be positive, one of them be negative and the positive one infects the negative one.

Everyone who is quarantined should be paid compensation.

The key challenge here is testing everyone who develops a fever. This will require the mass-production (or mass-importation) of COVID-19 testing equipment. As of February 25th China announced it was making 1.7 million nucleic acid based tests and 350,000 antibody tests per day as time goes by that number will only increase.

If not enough tests are available to test everyone who develops a fever for COVID-19, one option would be limiting tests to older adults with fever, as incidences of fevers generally decrease with age or to only test those who are also experiencing a shortness of breath along with a fever. Although only 18.6% of people with COVID-19 experience a shortness of breath, due to the fact that there are multiple individuals in each cluster, even these more restrictive criteria should be sufficient to identify new clusters of infection.

Beyond that, there is the man-hours which testing and contact tracing involves.

To the greatest extent possible, the testing of individuals with fevers should be performed by unskilled, rapidly trained volunteers rather than healhcare professionals (as healthcare professionals will have more important uses of their time)

Accuracy is not critical for the first sweep of testing everyone with a fever to identify new infection clusters, as there will be mulitiple COVID-19 cases in each cluster who develop fevers. Even if tests which hastily-trained volunteers conduct yield 80% false negatives, provided there are substantially more than 5 people in a previously undetected cluster, then the infection cluster as a whole will be detected. The most desirable characteristic of these first pass test kits is that they don’t yield false negatives.

Once a new infection cluster is identified, at that point, teams with higher skill levels can be recruited to perform contact tracing and to test and quarantine all of the contacts of anyone who tests positive for COVID-19. If the entire society meticulously practices social distancing, (not contacting other people outside of your immediate household with the exception of economically necessary activities), this process of contact tracing will be far simpler, quicker and more straightforward. Indeed, provided social distancing is observe by the whole of society, this process of contact tracing and quarantine may be successfully deployed to contain even quite a large outbreak. As the outbreak gets larger, it may become increasingly necessary to rely on self-isolation and community supervision of the premises of those self-isolating as opposed to a quarantine that is managed by healthcare workers or other direct employees of the state.

Perhaps, to encourage reporting, a cash prizes of $2500 could be offered to the first member of a new, previously undetected, infection cluster who tests positive for COVID-19.

The ECDC has told countries to take a rational approach and conserve testing, contact tracing PPE use and hospitalization for high-yield situations.

In the case of any scarce resource, it is important to use that resource efficiently. Nevertheless, the mass-production of tests and the mass conduction of tests is the highest priority for any containment effort.

Containment will fail unless new infection clusters are promptly, and rapidly, detected.

New infection clusters can only be detected with sufficient rapidity if massive amounts of tests are roled out.

If europe cannot mass-produce test, then it must mass import COVID-19 tests from a country that can.

This is the only way to contain this plague.

Infection Tight Borders

 

Eliminating, or vastly reducing, the COVID-19 spread within the community of a nation is little use if vast numbers of infected people constantly pour into that nation from locations where the disease is still rife.

Due to the negative effect on tourism and business, many nations cannot be trusted to be fully honest about the number of COVID-19 infections occurring within their borders. The most robust way to deal with it is to test a random sample of 1% of travellers from foreign destinations, as they enter the country’s ports and airports.

If 1 traveler from a foreign country tests positive for COVID-19 then test every traveler that enters from that country and force the travelers in question to pay for the test as a condition of entry.

If more than 0.1% of travelers test positive for COVID-19: close the border with the country in question with respect to all travel that isn’t essential to the nation’s interest.

The beauty of this approach is it directly tests the thing that matters: the number of infections that enter the country from a given destination. If the disease-exporting country can successfully ensure COVID-19 cases don’t get aboard its plane, then an open border can be maintained with it even if COVID-19 cases exist at a low level within its borders. This approach of direct measurement on entry is also robust against the use of conduit countries. For example, if country A has closed its borders with country B but not country C, and country C has not closed its border with country B then, if a significant number of infected travelers from country B fly to country C and then fly from country C to country A, then country A will rapidly detect a rise in infections from the random sample of tested travelers arriving from country C see and will rapidly demand that all travelers entering from country C must pay to test themselves for COVID-19 before entering country A.

Home Delivery And Efficient PPE Use

 

The key to reducing the spread of infection is to divide society into closed interacting groups where different groups minimize physical interaction with one another (ofcourse widespread digital communication between members of different groups is fine). Broadly speaking, we can divide the components of the necessary interactions in our lives into:

  1. Social (Limited to a closed household during the pandemic)
  2. Financial (The workplace)
  3. Material (Where we spend the money we earn on goods we want – the market)

Most B2B businesses have stable relationships with a small number of suppliers. In this sense, so long as employees in any business always work with the same co-workers, then if an outbreak occurs, then so long as physical interations between suppliers and customers are limited, its spread will be limited to the workers in that business along with their respective households. This is why I mentioned, in the section “What Does Social Distancing Mean?”, that it’s very important for the containment effort that people who go to different places of work should not live in the same house.

This avoids a workplace-household-workplace-household-workplace-household chain of COVID-19 transmission.

However, at the end of every production chain is the final customer, and if the ultimate output is a mass prroduced good, then that good must also be mass-dispersed to the final customer.

It is crucially important that the mass dispersion of mass produced physical goods do not also mass-disperse the coronavirus as part of the delivery process.

Consider the two different ways of delivering goods to final customers

  • Goods are delivered to shops and then a bunch of random customers mill around the various shops handling the merchandise, breathing the air in the enclosed space, coughing, etc.,

or

  • A single delivery man delivers goods to 500 different customers every single week

In order to effectively prevent the spread of infection in the shop, ever single customer of that shop must equip themselves with PPE. However, in order to prevent the spread of infection during the process of directly delivering goods to people’s doors, only the delivery man must equip himself with PPE and if he drops off goods at doors of customers, without asking them to sign, then the entire delivery process is relatively safe – certainly far more safe than lots and lots of different shoppers all breathing the air in the same enclosed space of the shop.

Door-to-door delivery is a far safer way for customers to acquire the goods they need when compared to shopping. The practice of signing on delivery should be halted. Delivered goods should be dropped at the door, confirmation of receipt should sent by text instead.

Furthermore, scarce PPE resources should be focused on last mile delivery men.

Indeed, the two professions that require PPE more than any other are:

  1. Healthcare professionals (including testing and contact tracing teams)
  2. Last mile delivery men (wrt to both letters and parcels)

These are the best areas to apply PPE in order to limit the widespread dispersion of COVID-19.

People should cook their own food. Takeaway food that has recently been prepared can be a vector for viral transmission.

 

Dynamic Lockdown

 

Hopefully things won’t get bad enough to require an entire city to be completely locked down as it was in Wuhan, but the geometric logic of locking down large population centres is inescapeable : the circumference of a circle increases in proportion to the radius, whereas the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. Threfore, 2 times as many police/military personnel can enforce a quarantine over 4 times as many residents, 3 times as many police/military can enforce a quarantine over 9 times as many residents, etc.,

What didn’t make sense in Wuhan was confining healthy individuals in the Locked Down area. Healthy individuals that would otherwise be capable of contributing to keeping the country going.

In a dynamic lockdown, which would occur in areas where the rate of infections crossed a certain threshold:

  1. Every resident would be instructed to stay in doors, to immediately halt the rate of further transmission

  2. Healthy (and later also fully recovered) residents could then apply online to emigrate from the locked down area.

  3. The emigration process from locked down areas would be as follows:
    1. To qualify, applicants must not have had fever anytime in the past month
    2. To qualify, applicants must conform to lockdown orders, applicants seen leaving their house without a permit will be disqualified for emigration
    3. Applicants are delivered a COVID-19 self-test pack through the letter-box
    4. One by one, qualifying applicants are driven by volunteers to an emigration facility
    5. At the emigration facility, further tests are done, and once their lack of COVID-19 infection has been confirmed to a high level of certainty, they are free to leave the locked down area and receive some compensation for the inconvenience
  4. In the event, that quarantine facilities or self-isolation isn’t effective in areas with lower levels of COVID-19 infections, quarantined individuals (who have either tested positive, or are in an incubation period) outside of the locked down area will be transported into the locked down area and allocated a house of someone who has emigrated as a result of testing negative for COVID-19

This would both allow uninfected residents of the locked down area to leave and become productive members of society during the crisis while also effectively turning the entire locked down area into a giant quarantine facility. With each house, effectively isolating the respective individuals in quarantine from each other (so that people who are not infected during quarantine won’t infect those who are).

Delivery men deliver essential goods to people’s door inside the locked down area. Residents are paid a lock down allowance. Rent and mortgage payments are suspended.

Controlled Infection Of Key Workers

 

As I mentioned before, “flattening the curve” infect the entire country at a “manageable pace for the hospitals to cope with” and thereby build herd immunity up across the whole country would take an impossibly long time. Approximately 40 years.

However, the NHS employs 1.7 million people, that is about 2.6% of the total U.K. popultion of 66.4 million.

This would imply, it may be possible to manageably infect all young NHS employees with no other underlying health conditions that would place them in the at risk group in a staggered manner over a timeframe of less that 1 year. And although young people without health conditions still do sometimes develop serious complications from COVID-19, the rate a which they do is much lower and even for those who do, provided they are given adequate medical attention, their likelihood of living through it is much higher.

Another issue is that exhaustion, makes those who are infected with COVID-19 far more likely to succumb. So if there was a proper policy of infecting young healthcare workers with COVID-19, telling them to chill out and take it easy, eat a nutritious diet, and get plenty of sleep before they even start to develop symptoms, they will be much more likely to fully recover without too many complications compared to a scenario where those same healthcare workers get infected in the middle of a crisis situation where they are stressed out and worked to the bone.

Although developing herd immunity, in the general population would take too long, there may well be a case for deliberately cultivating herd immunity in healthcare workers that are at low-risk of serious complications before things get to crisis levels, these immune healthcare workers could then be deployed strategically to protect older health professionals who have a higher risk of infection.

Finally, the manner of controlled infection should be conducted so as to minimise the evolution of the virus. Long chains where A infects B infects C infects D and so on, facilitate evolution (and the more COVID-19 strain evolve, the harder it will be to develop a vaccine for all of them). Conversely by preserving a sample of virus in longterm storage and then infecting all the non-at-risk health workers gradually, in a staggered way, from the same sample and then telling them to self-isolate and order what they need by delivery this mass-immunization process will minimally facilitate the evolution of the virus.

 

Empty Streets Mandate For High Crime Areas

 

 

Normal policing involves a lot of human interaction, gathering evidence, talking to people, finding out if they’ve done anything wrong. Perhaps even manhandling individuals who are trying to escape arrest.

Many of these business-as-usual activities run a high risk of infecting police officers along with any individuals the may interview, interrogate or arrest.

If we don’t want COVID-19 to spread through the police force like wildfire, and take a large chunk of the police force out of action in the process, the nature of policing will have to significantly change during the COVID-19 pandemic (at least in hard hit areas).

It is an inescapable fact, that, in order to enforce compliance from a distance, and keep the police force safe from infection during the pandemic, the police will need to make greater use of projectile weapons such as guns (even if they shoot tranquilizer darts). Arrests will generally take the form of police pointing projectile weapons at criminals and suspects and ordering them to get into the back of the van or else they will shoot.

Social distancing, if well-enforced, will tend to reduce serious crimes, as injuring or killing people requires close proximity. So other than crimes between members of the same household, an empty streets policy would make policing much more efficient.

It would also simplify reporting. Normally, when people see a group of individuals walking down the street, they have no idea whether that group is a criminal gang or a group of law-biding individuals engaging in some legitimate activity, it is only when that group assaults someone, or breaks into a house that bystanders will be able to identify that the law has been broken and can phone the police. At this stage however, it is unlikely that the officers of the law will arrive on time. Furthermore, they must get statements and testimony to the effect that the law has been broken

An empty streets policy, in badly affected areas, would simplify all this. The instant the residents of a community saw people walking down the street, they would instantly know they were violating the empty streets mandate. The residents could immediately call the police. The police, or military could then appear with guns and order the violators from a distance to get in the back of a van where they could be arrested and detained – at least for the duration of the pandemic. No witness interviews would be required, if they were walking the streets, they are violating the mandate.

Such a policy, if enforced rigorously in a particular area, would have the effect of drastically reducing burglaries and fights in that area.

Perhaps in some areas, where crime is low, it would not be necessary to enforce such a policy, but, if push comes to shove, it would be a simple solution to protect residents in high crime areas from attack while, at the same time, protecting the police and military by enabling them to protect the public while simultaneously reducing their own risk of infection.

Monetary Policy

 

Money is how we decide how to distribute the beneficial, yet scarce, resources which are available. Everyone needs some scarce resources, which is why most people are willing to spend a great deal of their lives working for money. To a first approximation, during normal times, all we need to do is ensure that transactions between customers an sellers are voluntary and ensure that sellers deliver their services to customers as promised, and then throw a few environmental, employee safety and minimum wage regulations on top and then broadly speaking, members of society should behave, roughly, in such a manner so as to optimally serve each other’s needs and wants.

During a deadly pandemic, much of this changes, as many commercial interactions that would otherwise be harmless or even beneficial, during normal times, may serve to spread the deadly contagion and, by so doing, can become potentially lethal. Yet not everyone who has trained for their entire lives to perform a particular job for a wage – which during a pandemic might tend to increase the spread of the virus – can rapidly switch to new ways of doing things that will both:

  • Reduce the spread of the virus
  • While at the same time earn a living from customers

While some people may be able to change the way they work to perform services for customers in new ways that reduce the risk of infection, others may have to cease working altogether. It is essential that the portion of society which ceases work, as a result of the pandemic, be given enough money to be able to continue to procure the means to live.

There are seven measures the government should take to ensure that no one feels financially obliged to continue performing an unnecessary economic activity that contributes to spreading COVID-19 throughout the population:

  1. Quarantine Allowances
  2. Quarantine Finance
  3. Work Prohibition Allowance
  4. Work Prohibition Finance
  5. Cluster Identification Prizes
  6. Rent Collection Suspension
  7. Mortgage Payment Suspension
  8. Suspension of Interest Payments

Quartantine allowances are made available unconditionally to anyone who is ill or who needs to be quarantined for a short while as people run tests to make sure they are COVID-19 negative.

Work prohibition allowances occur when someone’s job is either:

  1. Economically unnecessary and greatly contributes to the spread of the disease
  2. When two or more people who commute to seperate workplaces cohabit the same household, one must be prohibited from working in order to break the workplace – household – workplace – household – workplace chain of transmission, by default, all workers who are prohibited from working will immediately receive a workplace prohibition allowance. However, they may be required to retrain or apply for non-prohibited jobs, and demonstrate as much, depending on their skill sets

Quarantine finance and work prohibition finance arise from the fact that some people have become accustomed to a higher standard of living than others. And while people who are isolating themselves equally should receive equal pay, those who, for whatever reason, live lives with higher levels of fixed expenditure than others, should receive additional finance at low interest to avoid hardships and disruption do to high fixed living expenses. All extra finance must be repaid eventually, perhaps quarantine finance could be run in a similar manner to student loans where you don’t have to pay it back until your income exceeds a certain threshold.

Cluster identification prizes are there to encourage people with COVID-19 like symptoms to get tested. $2500 should be paid to anyone who tests positive as part of a new cluster that cannot be linked to existing clusters – provided they have observed reasonable social distancing precautions.

Rent collection and mortgage payments should be suspended. With mortgage payments suspended, most part-time landlords should be able to afford to halt the collection of rent. Banks will not have to pay interest out to savers or bondholders, so the mortage repayment moratorium will not cause them to collapse. The central bank can furthermore offer longterm 0% interest loans to private banks to ensure they have the cash on hand to pay out depositors.

With such measures, it should be possible for everyone to adhere to quarantines while continuing to procure the finances necessary to live.

 

Beating It Down During The Summer

 

COVID-19 initially escaped from China after mid Januiary as the flu season was starting to wind down. Probably, until mid-February cases in the majority of countries were in the triple digits. Yet, now in March, things are really starting to slip out of control, with many countries witnessing rapid exponential explosions in their respective case numbers.

There seems to be a fairly consistent trend of slower growth rates in countries by the equator and in the Southern Hemisphere. However – please note – although infection numbers in the Southern hemisphere and on the equator are growing more slowly than those in Northern climates, they are still growing!

What summer might do, if we are lucky, is slow the rate of the exponential growth in cases, to give countries where things really seem to be getting out of control (Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the U.S., possibly Canada, Switzerland, the U.K. and Norway – Iran may be too far gone already) just enough time to put the breaks on the growth rate if combined by a comprehensive slew of other highly aggressive containment measures. Please note, it will not be enough for countries with advanced outbreaks in the triple digits to merely stop infection numbers of COVID-19 from growing during the summer, IT WILL BE NECESSARY TO BEAT THE NUMBER OF COVID-19 INFECTIONS BACK DOWN INTO THE DOUBLE OR, AT MOST LOW TRIPLE DIGITS before next Autumn THIS IS CRITICAL!!!

With aggressive containment measures in place, along with preparedness and constant vigilance, it will probably be possible to keep whacking down and containing infection clusters as they arise during the winter flu season, so long as the initial number at the start of the season are in the low triple digits or less.

 

The Post-Outbreak Future

 

In his infamous “herd immunity” interview Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News that if you lockdown infected areas in the country for 4 months straight you could successfully suppress the virus, but then argues against lockdowns based on the fact that all of the evidence from previous epidemics suggests that after suppressing the virus, if you then relax the restriction “it all comes back again.”

He’s probably right.

However, the last previous highly lethal epidemic, that was sufficiently deadly to justified a resource-intensive containment response, was over a century ago. And, technologically speaking, the world is very different today to what it was 100 years ago.

Our medical system today is much more responsive. Consider how effective tests for COVID-19 were developed weeks after the initial outbreak. It’s certainly true that if after suppressing the virus for 4 months through lockdowns, when we then relax those lockdowns, clusters of infection will once again spring up. However, the number of infection clusters will be much smaller – after lockdowns and suppression – than before and, on the otherhand, in the intermediate period during the 4 month lockdown, the rate of production for COVID-19 testing equipment will have ramped up and be much larger.

In addition to this, during those 4 months, it will also be possible to deliberately infect, and hopefully immunize, a number of NHS workers, who fit in the low risk group, with COVID-19, creating herd immunity, at least in healthcare settings, where immunized healthcare workers are strategically deployed in the required concentrations to ensure such herd immunity.

Furthermore, in 4 months time, stocks of PPE will also be larger.

So, yes, even after successfully suppressing the outbreak and relaxing the lockdown it will be necessary to continue to test everyone who develops a fever, promptly for COVID-19 infection and in the case of small localized outbreaks, alert the population in the area and encourage social distancing and the wearing of PPE, where convenient, ( but nothing as severe as the kind of lockdown prior to suppression ) while rapidly sending in a contact tracing team to identify all the contacts, to test and quarantine the entire infection cluster.

This state of high vigilance, of constantly testing those with a fever for COVID-19, will need to be maintained for many months, possibly many years, after the initial outbreak has been quenched. And while it will be possible to relax social distancing considerably once the outbreak is quenched, eveyone must remain prepared and ready to rapidly reinstate at least some of the social distancing measures in the event that an infection cluster is discovered in their local area (although for any one locality, this will be an occassional and comparatively short-live event – at least when compared with the initial lockdown). And random samples of travellers entering in from from foreign countries will also need to continuously be tested long after the main outbreak has been quenched. Teams of contact tracers will need to remain on standby and be ready to mobilise the instant a new infection cluster gets detected.

How long will this state of constant vigilance need to last?

The lockdown itself may well last for up to 4 months. With respect to the high alertness and readiness to instantly and rapidly respond to re-emerging infection clusters, it really depends on the schedule for vaccine development as well as the development of anti-viral drugs.

A vaccine is likely at least 18 months away, and even this is wishful thinking, as the schedule for developing a vaccine against an entirely new species of virus that is constantly evolving into new strains is uncertain. What does seem clearer is that there have been many promising results for treating this disease with anti-viral medication, and the like. Some doctors have tried treating pneumonia with vitamin-C, hydrocortisone and thiamine while clinical trials, that involve treating COVID-19 patients with remdesivir, are being conducted as we speak. Thai doctors have observed that a cocktail of HIV and flu anti-viral medication have produced improved outcomes for coronavirus patients in Bangkok. Australian researchers have also recently announced they have found a cure to COVID-19.

If either a vaccine can be found that reliably confers immunity to COVID-19, or a treatment with anti-viral drugs, which can affordable be mass-produced to reliably treat everyone with COVID-19 that eliminates the requirement of a respirator, or other expensive equipment, in the vast majority of cases then under those circumstances, it might be feasible to ease up on social distancing and allow the virus to let rip after a suffiiently large stockpile to treat everyone has been built up.

But, at least for the first year or two after the main outbreak is quenched, the post outbreak future will be a very different society to what we have today, and we may well remain on a state of high alert for several years going forward, even if relatively few people die and infection clusters can be successfully and rapidly suppressed as they arise.

The one upside in all of this is there is some evidence that the fear of COVID-19, in Japanese Society at least has brought a rapid end to the flu season. So the tentative possibility exists that all these efforts to contain the coronavirus may as a side effect, deliver a death blow to regular influenza.

 

Conclusion

 

If we take “containment” to mean halting the exponential spread of COVID-19 and reducing new infections to a residual linear trickle, then if we throw everything we have at this virus, as the suggested measures in this article lay out, this outbreak should be possible to contain even at the level of 100,000 to 1 million infections per country. Although, obviously, the larger and more well-distributed the outbreak, the more difficult, protracted, and expensive the containment effort will need to be.

This containment effort cannot succeed without deep determination and commitment on the part of every member of society. This time, we cannot just go about our daily lives and “leave it to the professionals” to sort this out. If we are to stand a chance of containing COVID-19, and avoiding a death toll comparable to that World War II, then everyone must do their bit. At this stage in the outbreak, quarantining and contact tracing can only work if meticulous social distancing is practiced by every member of society to the very limits that a functioning economy will allow. Only then will contact tracing be simple enough, and the growth rate of the epidemic slow enough, to enable disease control specialists to get ahead of it and push the R0 of the virus below 1 – even at this late stage.

And even after suppressing the main outbreak, we will need constant alertness, along with the active and rapid identification and suppression of infection clusters, as they emerge from time to time, for seveal years to come.

All this will be incredibly difficult to pull off and will require an incredible effort, but hundreds of millions of lives depend upon our success. The lives of a similar percentage of the world’s population which died during World War 2 (more in absolute terms) hang in the balance.

If World War 2 was worth throwing everything into, then so is COVID-19.

If we don’t care about 100’s of millions of people being killed, then why did we fight Hitler?

Today, the British government is afraid to instruct people to engage in extreme social distancing now for fear they won’t be able to sustain it for four months and will get fatigued, yet if, prior to Wold War 2, we operated on the assumption that our soldiers would get fatigued after 4 months of fighting, we would have surrendered rather than resisted.

If soldiers can fight wars for years on end to defend their countrymen, then is it really too much to ask people to stay indoors in comfortable suburban houses, with home entertainment systems and food delivered to their door, for months on end, in order to protect millions of innocent people from being slaughtered by this virus?

Because the virus is completely new, we do not know how long immunity against it lasts, we do not know how it will mutate, in the future, and as such, we do not even know if the projected mortality rate of 3-6% percent is a once off, or whether the virus – once is gets loose – will infect a substantial fraction of the world’s population and kill a few percent of the world’s population year after year after year. Herd immunity at this point is still speculation. We do not yet know if people develop immunity to COVID-19 and even if they do, the duration of their immunity, the strength of their immunity and the extent to which their immunity will be effective against subsequent stains of the virus that may evolve.

There is no guarantee that if this virus escapes, and becomes another seasonal illness, that it will become drastically milder than it currently is, or that the death toll that different strains of it inflicted upon us season after season, will be drastically lower than the current projected death toll.

We must not surrender! We must resist this virus!

We must throw everything we’ve got into containing it!

Containment or Bust!

John McCone

Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged With: Containment, Containment Plan, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Flatten the Curve, Hand Hygiene, Hygiene, Quarantine, Social Distancing

Some Important Truths Are Scientifically Unprovable

March 29, 2019 by admin

Juliann/Shutterstock.com

Can every important issue be scientifically investigated and, by comparing enough experiments with mathematical theories, answered conclusively? Can no philosophy uncover truths beyond the reach of science?

Here I argue that, despite the great service it renders humanity, certain biases, intrinsic to science, must be investigated from outside it. I will mention two examples where philosophical considerations can identify limits to the scientific method:

  • Freewill
  • Neurochemical Evaluations of Happiness

 

Why Free Will Is Scientifically Unprovable

 

An increasing number of scientists and psychologists reject the existence of free will. Indeed 86% of philosophers reject libertarian free will, with most believing that all our actions, down to the most minute decisions, are ultimately determined by circumstances outside our control (though compatibilists believe, so long as our desires align with our actions, we are acting freely even though we could neither act nor desire otherwise).

Is this slide towards determinism due to scientific discoveries… or is it the result of a bias in the scientific method itself?

Let us review what science is:

Science is a process whereby relationships of cause to effect are hypothesized and framed as competing theories. Some important predictions of these competing theories are then tested through experiment and observation. The theory with the greatest predictive power is then provisionally accepted while theories with lower predictive powers are usually rejected as false.

In other words, science is the inherent activity of deriving laws with ever-increasing predictive power. The game of science is the game of prediction. Yet prediction is only possible in a deterministic system.

Trying to use the scientific method to prove the existence of free will is like trying to use an earth excavator to fly to the moon. How can an intellectual activity that grants credibility to new hypotheses based on their predictive ability ever possibly grant credibility to a hypothesis that our behaviour is somewhat unpredictable due to our choices not being fully predetermined?

Science can only disprove free will and prove determinism – it is structurally incapable of the reverse. Science can only validate free will to the extent it fails to prove determinism – or runs up against its own limitations.

And yet…

…despite the inherent tendency of the scientific method to accept ever more deterministic descriptions of the physical world, and the unprovable nature of free will, it’s hard to see how our current scientific knowledge based upon experiments could be more favourable to libertarian free will.

The requirements of libertarian free will are quite philosophically demanding. If every action was exactly determined by preceding circumstances, then there would be no freedom, yet if every action was completely uncorrelated with subsequent actions, there would be no will. The notion of will is that an agent’s wishes determine some of its important future actions so as to materialize that wish in reality. These simultaneous requirements seem almost self-contradictory, yet a system whose behaviour is predictable – and heavily predetermined – in the short term, yet unpredictable in the long term, would satisfy the necessary criteria for a modest interpretation of libertarian free will.

Absolute free will (including the freedom to teleport yourself to Mars) is omnipotence. No advocate of libertarian free will, or any sane human being, would seriously claim we possess this. Libertarian free will is simply the modest claim we possess some free will; that our brains can make some important conscious decisions; that some conscious decisions, which arise from our minds, produce physical actions with physical outcomes that were not always predetermined; that we could have decided differently and – had we done so – a different physical action and outcome could have arose as a result of that different decision (that if you wind back the clock far enough to the same past condition and run reality again – a different outcome could result).

The uncertainty principle, states that the position and momentum of particles is fundamentally undetermined. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is more than just a limitation in our ability to measure particle position, as theses diagrams of electron orbitals in the hydrogen atom show. Each orbital represents the spatial probability of finding a single electron in a particular location in the atom. The p-orbital, for example, contains two dumb-bells of finite probability separated by an infinite plane of zero probability. The zero probability plane completely separates the finite probability regions from each other. There is no possible path for the electron to get from one finite probability region to the other without crossing the zero probability plane, yet if the electron didn’t cross the zero probability plane, the electric field and chemical characteristics of the hydrogen atom would be different. Thus, the electron must simultaneously exist on both sides of the zero probability plane.

3D representation of p-orbital probability cloud

Some theories appeal to an infinite number of unprovable parallel universes to interpret wave function collapse as being deterministic, but if we go back to the core value of science: experimental data is king. And experimentally, wave function collapse is non-deterministic.

While the short-term wiggle room for free will is limited to one atomic radius, the butterfly effect means very small differences in initial conditions can give rise to large differences in final outcomes. Here is the first observed example of a computer model exhibiting divergent trajectories in phase space.

Lorenz Experiment: The first time the Butterfly Effect was detected

The initial conditions vary by less than one part in a million, and, initially, the evolution of the system in both cases seems identical, but, after a period, the trajectory of both runs start to diverge and, eventually, they exhibit some important yet completely different behaviours.

 

The combined scientific observation of fundamental quantum uncertainty and long-term divergent behaviour from similar initial condition is conducive with short term macroscopic determinism and long-term macroscopic indeterminism. In other words, quantum uncertainty, when combined with the Butterfly Effect, leaves room for free will in psychology.

It is hard to imagine a physical description more favourable for the philosophically demanding requirements of libertarian free will than those routinely used to describe the behaviour of complex natural systems.

However, this may indicate free will has a long actuation time, which the Libet experiment cannot refute. Total short term freedom would, after all, negate the existence of a meaningful will.

Therefore, scientists who reject free will do not do so due to any scientific discovery (indeed discoveries in physics could scarcely infer a universe more favourable to free will) but rather due to of biases innate to the scientific method itself.

To complain there is no causal  mechanism for free will and, therefore, that it doesn’t exist is to completely miss the point. Causal mechanisms are, by nature, deterministic. A causal mechanism for free will is an oxymoron and demonstrates how the tool box of science is fundamentally unequipped to prove the existence of free will. If no scientific experiment could ever falsify determinism, then claims for determinism are as unscientific as claims for free will.

 

Neurochemical Evaluations of Happiness

 

Given the importance we place on happiness, it’s worth asking: “What exactly is happiness?”

 

Understandably, many neuroscientists and psychologists have brought their expertise to bear on research in this area. Scientific enquiries into conditions for producing happiness are both valuable and important. But is there any hard limit to the authority and expertise that progressive experimental discoveries could convey to researchers studying happiness (and other subjective feelings like misery)?

 

Consider this thought experiment:

Jim walks into an MRI scanner where his brain activity is thoroughly analysed. After emerging from the machine, the researchers, who have decades of experience studying neurochemistry, say to Jim: “We’ve analysed your brain chemistry and the results are conclusive. You are acutely depressed.”

Jim responds: “But I feel happy! I rarely get depressed.”

To which the researchers respond: “You are clearly mistakenly evaluating your own experience. The results of the MRI are conclusive. You are acutely depressed. You must register for a happiness enhancement course. It’s for your own good.”

Jim responds: “But I don’t need a happiness enhancement course, I already am happy.”

To which one researcher responds: “Jim, I have a 1st class degree in neuroscience, a Phd. in evaluating the neurochemistry of happiness and depression. I have spent the last 15 years looking at different people’s brain activities and evaluating them for happiness, or misery. The other 10 researchers on my team all have similar levels of experience and, after analysing your brain activity, we have all reached the same conclusion: that you are thoroughly depressed. How much experience do you have in analysing brain patterns?”

To which Jim responds: “None.”

The researcher then asks: “So why do you think you’d have more knowledge about your brain patterns than a team of researchers who’ve spent decades of their careers measuring and analysing brain patterns to decide whether patients are happy or miserable?”

 

Question:

Could any amount of scientific advances, cranial measuring equipment or AI data analysis techniques in an infinitely sophisticated future ever conceivably make it possible for the team of neuroscientists to be right and for Jim to be wrong?

 

I take the view that, for any sensible definition of happiness or misery, the answer to this question is “no.” All happiness evaluations must begin with a questionnaire. Now through comparing questionnaires with measured brain activity, facial expressions or other kinds of behaviour, we may find reliable markers that correlate well with reported happiness (dopamine levels, serotonin levels, activities in particular brain centres etc.). In the future, neuroscientists may, by monitoring brain activity, be able to anticipate reported happiness with 99%, 99.99% or 99.99999% accuracy. So, if neuroscience can achieve such accuracy in predicting how someone reports feeling, what happens when that one person reports a very different feeling to what the instruments tell the scientists he should feel? Are the scientists wrong about how the subject feels – or is the subject wrong about his own feelings?

Given that reported feelings are the foundation for correlating brain activity to subjective experience, subjective present experience must always have absolute sovereignty.

 

One could, of course, scientifically define happiness in terms of dopamine levels much like we define force as mass times acceleration, but such a definition would be irrelevant to the inherent philosophical value of happiness as a subjective sense of satisfaction, joy, pleasure, freedom from suffering, etc., etc., And there probably is a danger that, in the future, overzealous neuroscientists might favour scientific definitions of emotions like happiness, anger, sadness, depression that are easier to objectively measure and stick into computer models, even if such definitions are less relevant to the subjective emotions that we feel and value. There’s also a tendency in some fields to ignore outliers, in order to get journal papers published. All of this, if unscrutinised, could result in experts overriding people’s subjective experience.

 

But:

It is certainly possible that, in the future, neuroscientists will gain sufficient understanding of the workings of the brain to anticipate your future subjective experience, or evaluate your past subjective experiences, better than you can yourself.

 

The absolute sovereignty of the individual in evaluating their own experience, only applies to their immediate present experience. Expertise can (and probably someday will) anticipate people’s future subjective experience with greater accuracy than they themselves can. And there is already some important evidence that we aren’t good at objectively evaluating (or accurately remembering) how happy we were during an extended past period. People’s evaluation of their level of happiness over their entire lifespan varied noticeably based on whether they had recently found a few dimes left by a photocopying machine, suggesting our present mood strongly influences how we evaluate past emotions.

Experts may also understand why a subject reports an experience better than the subject’s own belief for the reasons of his experience. Numerous experiments clearly demonstrate that people can frequently give erroneous accounts of the reasons for their motivations and, perhaps, even feelings.

But this does not alter our absolute knowledge of our immediate subjective experience itself.

But being able to predict what people will subjectively feel themselves in the future, or why they feel what they feel, better than they can themselves, is distinct from being able to dictate what people feel in the present, better than they can themselves.

 

There may also be a one-to-many problem that runs both ways, where many different brain-states in different people lead to similar subjective experiences, while nearly identical brain-states in different people may occasionally give rise to significantly different subjective experiences.

So the evaluation of people’s present experience through evaluating neurological activity is an example of where science can only catch up with, but never surpass, common personal experience.

 

John

 

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Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged With: Butterfly Effect, Free Will, Libertarian, Limits of science, Philosophy, philosophy of the future, Psychology, some important, unprovable, unproveable

Idolatry – The Forgotten Sin

February 12, 2019 by admin

Idolatrous Worship
Michael Rosskothen/Shutterstock.com

To many, the very notion of idolatry seems quaint and out-dated. Yet to monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam idolatry forms the basis of the divine order of their moral universe. Are they simply mistaken? Or is idolatry a sin that is still conceptually relevant to modern thinking?

This article interprets the monotheistic tradition as humankind’s quest to understand, as best we can, the one, true overarching divine order which governs our universe and find our proper relationship to it as limited beings. In this respect, modern science is simply an extension of the monotheistic project, and many early enlightenment scientists were deeply religious and pursued science in the service of God speaking of “the creator’s own stamp upon creation” ( Francis Bacon ) or asserting that “Nature is the book of God written in the language of mathematics” ( Galileo ).

Johannes Kepler even wrote:

“May God make it come to pass that my delightful speculation have…the effect which I strove to obtain in the publication; namely, that the belief in the creation of the world be fortified through this external support, that thought of the creator be recognized in its nature, and that his inexhaustible wisdom shine forth daily more brightly”

Yet, there are many examples of the sin of hubris in the Bible, where time and time again, Jews were drawn to worship golden calves, and other idolatrous practices, in the high places. Indeed, many Muslims regard adoring images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints as a slippery slope towards idolatry.

What draws people, reared to believe in God, towards idolatry time and time again?

I believe the origin of idolatry is twofold:

  • A fear of the infinite
  • A desire to Self-Worship by Worshiping our Creations

 

Fear of The Infinite And The Sin of Idolatry 

 

Everyday, we must make decisions to survive and sometimes those decisions must be right. Is this berry edible? How much food should I store in case of a drought? Should I take out a loan to expand my business? Is now a good time to sell those stocks? How should I treat my child’s illness? Are enemy submarines hiding along this shipping route? On occasions, the wrong choice can produce horrifying results, the bankruptcy of a business, the injury or death of a loved one or infant, the collapse of a civilization.

When stakes are high, we must be sure we are right. Yet certainty is impossible in an infinitely large, infinitely complex and infinitely subtle universe. We can only try our best to make decisions based on the highest comprehension we can achieve in the allotted time – and hope it’s good enough. But however much we may hope that our decisions are good enough – this is never guaranteed. We might always miss something out: with dire consequences.

Any attempts to represent the infinite with the finite is a subtle form of idolatry. Our minds constantly tempt us to simplify and try to encapsulate infinity in something relatively simple – or at least comprehensible. Something we can perceive. We then delude ourselves into thinking, that through fully understanding the false idol we use to represent infinity, we fully understand infinity itself.

This idea is both seductive and comforting. But it can also distract and instill a false sense of security and hubristic omniscience. The idol captures the worshipers’ entire attention who become convinced that nothing else is relevant. This blinds them to the rest of the world – including things of critical importance.

Idolatry breeds ignorance – and ignorance can be fatal. This is one of two deadly sins central to idolatry – a refusal to perceive reality or God on His own terms.  The idolatrous instead insist that He must simplify Himself to accommodate our limited cognition (which won’t happen).

Our need to avoid this fatal tendency is as relevant today as it was at the time of Abraham, Christ or Muhammad.

We must keep our mind open and prepared for new occurrences that signify important events, even unexpected ones.

 

Idolatry: Self-Worship by Worshiping Our Creations

 

We take pride in our creations, often viewing them as extensions of ourselves. The craftsman who creates the false idol, in some subtle way, has an idolatrous sense he has created God. By worshiping our creations, we subtly worship ourselves. If something we have crafted is grand enough to create the universe – how much grander must we be? Of course no one who fashions Holy works will admit this, but deep down they feel an idolatrous pride in them.

Beyond idolatrous pride, there is control. A false sense of molding the powers which mold our universe.

Not everyone fashions idols directly, but when a community worships the idols it creates, that community tacitly commits a kind of self-idolatry.

As the comprehension of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omniscience, so the crafting of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omnipotence; a false sense of power.

In truth, humankind cannot fashion, or mold, most of reality. We only control or influence a tiny portion of it. By clearly understanding what we do and don’t control, we can affect what we can control to prepare for what we can’t. Trying to mold what cannot be changed directs resources and effort away from what can. Instead of building a giant statue to bring future rain, it is better to devote our energies to building a warehouse to store grain and prepare for times of drought.

The seductive opportunity to feed our self love through worshiping the idols we create adds to our primal desire for simplicity and total comprehension and strengthens our adoration while blinding us to everything beyond the idol.

 

The divine order of the universe is what it is. It cannot be remolded by remolding clay idols.

 

Not All Idols Are Made of Clay

 

Not all idols are made of clay. Anytime we fixate on, and worship, a portion of creation – especially a man-made one – but ignore the rest, we commit idolatry. This portion can even be a Holy Book. To speak of “The God of The Bible” or “The God of The Quran” is to commit idolatry. It suggests God somehow “belongs” to a particular book. This is an absurd, idolatrous attempt to subject the infinite to the finite, to subject God to the scribblings of men.

 

Indeed, verses within the Quran itself declare the limitations of the text and warn the reader against taking it as the totality of truth:

“And if all the trees on earth were pens and the oceans were ink, with seven oceans behind it to add to its supply yet would not the words of Allah be exhausted in the writing: For Allah is exulted in power, full of wisdom”

Luqman, 31/27

…that’s a lot more ink than the Quran contains.

 

Yet if instead of talking about The God of The Bible we speak of The Bible (or Quran) of God, this still doesn’t overcome the problem of focusing on a tiny portion of the infinite while ignoring the rest.

What’s wrong with the rest of creation? Is one Holy Book the only thing that belongs to God? What about all the other books? If God created everything, does not everything belong to Him?

To revere one Holy Book above all else is to implicitly devalue the rest of the universe.

 

One can also find secular strains of Idolatry…

 

The Social Sciences, which focus on mankind, intrinsically risk ignoring the physical universe which exists independently of human thought and society. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book, published in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality,  almost suggests that objective reality is entirely created by human thought and interaction. Other social constructivists like Humberto Maturana and Kenneth Gergen assert as many truths on any one topic exist as there are communities to construct them. This view of human society as the sole creator of reality and arbiter of truth dangerously resembles the second form of hubristic idolatry, and runs the same fundamental risk of drawing our attention away from the physical environment and lulling us into falsely believing we can “deliberate” away all our problems as any social consensus will work since no reality exists outside society.

Economics is another social science that believes in the omnipotence of the crowd and “the invisible hand of the market” (represented, interestingly, by a golden bull) which can make us become infinitely rich so long as we frantically compete against each other and only care about ourselves. Consumers are assumed to be omnipotent and infallible. We are paying the price for running the world according to a discipline that ignores everything except human desire with environmental destruction – and possibly a future climate Armageddon.

 

Still think idolatry is irrelevant today?

 

The problem is that social sciences fundamentally cannot discriminate between knowledge and belief – knowledge being justified true belief. This is understandable, as belief is the sole motivator of human action, so fields that only study how human ideas relate to human behaviour, fundamentally cannot differentiate between true and false beliefs. It is only by paying attention to the physical consequences of an activity on the non-human environment compared to the believer’s expectations, that truth can be discriminated from falsehood. Yet this is a consideration that many, who work in social science, omit from their theorizing.

 

The Piety of Science

 

Attempts by major monotheistic religions to avoid finite distraction and perceive all existence, and our proper place within it, have met with limited success at best and abject failure at worst. Congregations constantly seek refuge from the infinite by fixating upon reassuringly finite prophets, saints, saviours and books with reassuringly human stories of battles, torture, slavery, and men with wings. Perhaps, monotheists are less distracted from the infinite than polytheists, but – let’s face it – monotheistic myths are still pretty distracting.

Monotheism is a step in the right direction…but it still falls short of the mark.

To fully perceive truth, we must abandon all false idols that distract us from the divine order of the universe, and our rightful place within it, dispense with preconceptions that hubristically try to mold God in the image of man and, instead, we must perceive the universal order on its terms and not our own. If we aim to perceive truth, we could do worse than pursue scientific enquiry. Mathematics, in particular, is as close as any intellectual exercise comes to the infinite, as it frequently adds infinite sums of infinitely small quantities. Mathematicians even contemplate different kinds of infinities!

There is much confusion over Atheism. Many atheists do not believe in a universe devoid of order. Indeed, Noether’s Theorem, a theorem that science universally accepts, categorically proves the conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum imply the order governing our universe is infinite in space, eternal in time (or as old as the universe itself?), and rotationaly invariant.

Many religious people complain science does not answer important moral questions about how to behave, and only describes how things are; not what we should do. This is Hume’s guillotine: that no knowledge concerning natural phenomena can shed light on normative principles. This neglects the fact that science itself is a set of normative principles, a set of beliefs on how we should go about forming our beliefs. This is something that Stefan Molyneaux points out in his book Universally Preferable Behaviour and indeed, by treating words as tool whose true meaning is that which optimizes their traditional function, I’ve argued fairly solidly in The Philosophical Method that preference utilitarianism is the one true morality.

Some also complain that scientism is crassly materialistic, leaving no room for supernatural events. Yet clearly everything which exists can only fall into one of three exhaustive categories:

  • That which we can perceive through our senses
  • That which affects what we perceive through our senses (this includes things that indirectly affect the things that affect the things we can perceive, and so on and so forth)
  • That which neither affects what we see nor affects anything that affects what we see

Science includes the study of both 1) and 2). Science studies the invisible forces that affect materials like gravity or electromagnetism as well as the materials themselves. On a galactic scale, scientific inquiry includes mapping out clouds of dark matter by observing the way they bend the light of galaxies. There are even neutrino detectors to observe a particle that almost (though not quite) fits into category 3).

Thus, if we consider “the supernatural” as everything that is beyond the reach of science, we arrive at the unavoidable logical conclusion that:

The supernatural is only beyond the reach of scientific study to the extent to which it does not affect the natural in any way.

Which would make the supernatural completely irrelevant.

Indeed, the only demand that science makes upon the universe is repeatability. Once something is repeatable, it is scientifically tractable and laws to describe it can be hypothesised and tested.

 

It is worth remembering that at the time of Kepler, many considered his theory that the tides are caused by action at a distance to be an unscientific appeal to occult forces. Thus:

There is no objective distinction between science and magic. The only distinction is subjective understanding.

Magical phenomena are any phenomena which cannot be understood with our existing  knowledge – even at a fundamental level.

THEREFORE

The statement: There is no such thing as magic.

IMPLIES

The statement: Everything we can see or will ever see in the future can be explained using our existing knowledge set.

Which may or may not be true. It’s certainly an ambitious (perhaps hubristic) assertion. However, although scientists might entertain the possibility of magical phenomenon, a magician – an authority in magic – is a contradiction in terms.

A magician is a human being who understands phenomena which cannot be explained by existing human knowledge.

This is an oxymoron.

So, while magical phenomena may exist, magicians, or any other authority figures in magic, do not.

 

Regarding miracles, since anything repeatable can be incorporated into scientific understanding, only unrepeatable phenomena are beyond science’s reach. So it is the religious foes of “scientism” that are advocating a disordered universe run by a capricious God who makes and breaks rules at a whim.

We appeal to miracles as proof of God’s existence. But why must God break His own laws to prove He exists? Surely the order of the universe itself would be the greater proof of an omnipotent, omniscient being than the arbitrary breaking of that order.

Miracles are incompatible with omniscience and omnipotence. An omniscient, omnipotent being who set up the order of the universe would know everything entailed by its initial creation and thus would never need to tweak it. A miracle implies a correction on the part of the creator: “Whoops! I didn’t see that coming! I better add this little tweak to correct the course of events! It’s ugly and sticks out like a sore thumb, I know, but it’s the best I can do!”

While an omnipotent, omniscient being might leave scope for free will, He would know exactly what choices He had created and left open for inhabitants. If He didn’t want people to be able to act a certain way, He would make it impossible a priori. An omnipotent, omniscient creator, by definition, could do this. Free will is not infinite but is bounded within a finite envelope of possibility which the order of the universe defines. To claim an omniscient, omnipotent being had to “step in” because His creations made “the wrong choice” is a contradiction in terms. If an action is acceptable, you create an order that allows people to perform it, if it is unacceptable, you create an order that prohibits it. An omniscient, omnipotent creator would never need to perform a miracle to stop his creations from doing something His original order allowed: “No wait! Don’t do that!”

 

Therefore:

Divine intervention implies divine imperfection.

 

And to believe in miracles is to believe in a less than perfect God.

 

This is the view of Deism.

 

So who’s right? Atheists or Deists?

 

If we stop attempting to mold God in the image of man, deism is only distinguishable from atheism by the belief that the universe was designed by “some kind of intelligence” as opposed to arising from mechanistic processes of cause and effect.

Yet is this distinction significant? Can Deists meaningfully argue with atheists?

“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept. Do we truly understand where the boundaries lie between the intelligent and the unintelligent? If we reject a God with human-like intelligence, that opens the door for pretty much anything. Intelligence can take a myriad of different forms.

Nor does the atheist position, that the universe arose through mechanistic processes, necessarily exclude deism, for atheists view intelligence itself as a mechanistic process and if intelligence is mechanistic, then some mechanistic processes may possess intelligence.

Interestingly, the google dictionary definition of intelligence as: “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” implies an omniscient being is unintelligent as it cannot acquire knowledge by virtue of already being full up! This is an example of the futility of arguing over the existence of an intelligent designer without generally understanding intelligence.

 

Idolatrous Forms of Atheism

 

Atheists come in, not one, but three, different varieties:

  • Scientists
  • Societalists
  • Radical Skeptics

I use the word “scientist” very loosely. By “scientist”, I don’t exclusively mean people actively engaged in research but rather anyone who believes inherent universal truths are independent of our subjective, or even inter-subjective, beliefs and are revealed through careful, direct interaction with the universe while observing and recording its precise response, comparing it to responses carefully observed by others, and assessing its significance through quantitative analysis. Scientists implicitly believe, as Galileo did, that the natural order is written in the language of mathematics. A scientist believes we must question the universe on its own terms, with carefully designed experiments, and then listen very carefully to its response. If no conceivable experimental outcome could dissuade our preconceptions, we are shouting at the universe without listening back. Scientists also believe the universe reveals its secrets equally to everyone, there are no special “prophets” or “messengers” privy to otherwise inaccessible knowledge, but all who ask the same question (i.e. runs the same experiment) receive the same response. This principle of repeatability forms the basis of science.

The second group of atheists are “societalists” who believe human society is the sole creator of all knowledge and truth in the universe. While most (though perhaps not all) believe reality exists without society, in the absence of social interpretation they view this as irrelevant, and many reject the possibility of “right” or “wrong” interpretations of reality at a cultural level. If culture and human institutions are the sole arbiters and creators of truth and knowledge, then the institution can never be wrong. And yet many societalists are revolutionaries who reject existing institutions and believe that by creating new ones – they can create any society they want. They believe that society is infinitely malleable to a sufficiently determined will and reject many natural bounds that religions believe should not be trangressed. Many societalists embrace the relativistic view of morality.

Finally, there are radical skeptics. Radical skeptics think everyone is full of BS. They believe there is no natural order, no morality, no values, science is bullshit, religion is bullshit, reason is bullshit, society is bullshit, everything is bullshit. Radical skeptics find liberation in universal cynicism and enjoy gratuitously challenging views and revealing treasured beliefs to be nonsense. The universal belief in BS affords a luxury of intellectual laziness. If everything’s bullshit, there’s no need to waste time or calories to rigorously apply reason. Radical skeptics usually have a little stock of generic tricks they can deploy to rapidly dismiss and “deconstruct” the arguments of others. Skepticism, the demand for evidence and justification in support of claims, is an important protection against falsehoods. However, the wholesale (often intellectually lazy) dismissal of everything, including reasoned arguments, takes skepticism a step too far. Everyone has implicit beliefs they need to make decisions, by rejecting everything that could alter them, the radical skeptic gives his own beliefs an infallible status.

 

The radical skeptic treats his own beliefs as unassailable while societalists treat the beliefs of society as infallible. Both these views take man or men collectively as the sole creator of knowledge and meaning, totally unaccountable to a wider reality. Only scientists believe we should take all of reality (and not just the minds of men) into account when formulating beliefs. Therefore, radical skepticism and societalism are both (type 2) false idolatrous forms of atheism while scientism – or humanism – is the one true atheism.

 

John

 

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Filed Under: Philosophy, Uncategorized Tagged With: Divine Order of the universe, Hubris in the bible, idol infinity, Idolatrous, Idolatry, Infinite sin, is idolatry a sin, omnipotent beings, Philosophy, Self idolatry, Sin of Hubris, Sin of Idolatry, subtle forms of idolatry

How Free Should Speech Be?

January 15, 2019 by admin

Aaron Amat/Shutterstock.com

With police arresting 2,500 Londoners over the past 5 years for sending electronic communications that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”, is free speech dead in the Western world? Are we entering into an age of authoritarian censorship? Is Europe fast becoming China?

Censorship and political correctness is not yet as bad in the West as it is in totalitarian China… according to some YouTubers, in certain respects, it’s already worse. As we condemn the Chinese for censoring the internet with their Great Firewall, the U.K. government has raised its own “Great British Firewall” to “protect” us from material that might turn us into terrorists… “terrorist” content like… studies linking vaccines with autism???? (If you’re in the U.K., go to this web page, click on the link in the second line of the second paragraph that says “study” and see what you get). So, to what extent is it O.K. to censor communication? It seems that whenever a government organization is given the power to censor dangerous communication, mission creep will always end with it censoring all information that influences public opinion in ways that politicians don’t like.

(It is not my intention promote any particular position on vaccination, merely to support the right of citizens to read about it without government interference.)

Perhaps there is some truth in John F Kennedy’s warning:

“And there is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment”

Without clear red lines that limit government censorship – we in the democratic west will lose everything. Every hard won right past generations struggled for centuries to secure could be lost in a few short decades. Once free speech goes, due process will follow shortly. Once due process goes, absolute tyranny will follow irrespective of any laws on paper.

In this post I will try to identify what aspects of free speech should be ring-fenced at all costs and without compromise. The issue of speech and communication is, unfortunately, a lot more tangled and complex than at first meets the eye, but hopefully people of all political inclinations will see some sense in a few proposals here – or at least acquire food for further discussion.

I will divide speech into 8 sub-classes:

  • Communication between consenting adults
  • Harassment
  • Sharing personal information
  • Communication at organized events and on private property
  • Communication in the Workplace
  • Libel and copyright infringement
  • Misinformation resulting in injury
  • Communication to organize activities that violate the law

 

Communication Between Consenting Adults

 

The free flow of information is as necessary for justice as the free flow of blood is for health or the free flow of money is for prosperity. At the very least, the right of consenting adults to privately exchange information and opinions with each other (unless they are actually plotting to directly violate the law in a tangible way) should be absolute and sacrosanct. Consensual communication should be immune from legal proceedings that relate to causing offence – since participants can avoid offence through withdrawing consent – including disorganized informal expressions of hatred (but not necessarily incitements to violence, property damage, theft or other illegal activities), so long as potentially offensive expressions are not directed at parties who do not wish to see them against their will. Ultimately, most published material is consensual and non-directed whether a book, a film or a blog. Posters in public spaces, billboards in the front of shops, or handing out leaflets to strangers on the street would not automatically qualify as consensual communication.

Even in the case of consensual communication (especially mass-publication), there is still the matter of violating someone’s privacy by publishing someone’s name, date of birth, home address, bank details, or other sensitive information. As well as libel or copyright infringement (discussed later).

 

Harassment

 

One of the most important distinctions between speech that should be immune from the law (or almost immune) and speech that may (though not necessarily) entail a legal responsibility is the distinction between consensual and non-consensual communication. We need to draw a clear line between communication and harassment. No one has the right to demand the time and attention of another human being (even worker-employer relationships are initiated with a job application by the worker), in fact a non-consensual, uncompensated demand on the attention of a stranger is not so very different from making a demand on their labour – a kind of slavery. Harassment is continuing to communicate, follow or man-handle someone after they explicitly tell you they wish to be left alone. In most cases, harassed private individuals should have legal recourse against their harassers.

There are exceptions where harassment may serve the public interest. Reporters might follow people who have acted unethically to publicly shame them. Perhaps a bank manager who gave out dodgy loans, a rogue trader who messed up the houses of clients by doing a shoddy job, a restaurant owner that added rats to people’s food, a CEO, whose company dumped toxic chemicals into drinking water and gave resident health problems, or a politician who embezzled public money. While most disputes where the party who has harmed the other does not wish to engage with them are best dealt with in court, the right of the press to confront some individuals that would rather not be confronted in order to serve the public interest is an important safeguard in a world where justice is imperfect,  judges can be bribed, and courts corrupted. I do, however, reject the notion that just being a celebrity – and nothing else – confers the public, or the press, with some kind of “right to harass”. Although, unfortunately, this seems to be the de facto norm today.

I think people have some right to verbally confront those who bad-mouth them behind their backs, or have damaged them in some malignant or negligent way – so long as a formal minimum level of good-manners is maintained during such confrontations. If you want the right not to be contacted by someone, don’t talk about them.

The other exception is debt collectors or anyone else with whom you have voluntarily entered into a contractual agreement that has not been honoured. Such people also have the right to harass (within limits).

Shouting hate-filled abuse in someone’s face against their will is not freedom of expression. It is harassment. If we make this clear distinction, and give members of the public confidence that the law will protect them from such disturbing experiences, then it should be possible to ring-fence the important elements of free speech and expression from legal censorship.

In addition to talking to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you, other forms of personally directed communication such as phone, snail mail or email, and private messages of all kinds in which the recipient has clearly expressed a desire not to receive them, should not qualify as protected forms of free expression. Neither should material handed to people in leaflets or large billboards in public space (not to say that such activities should be forbidden, but merely that they are more accountable for publicized content than more consensual media). Repeatedly using the @ sign in twitter after the account owner asks you to stop is a grey area. However, other than this, non-directed tweets and other social media messaging to followers who can unfriend or unfollow you at their leisure should count as protected consensual forms of free expression.

Reaching out to strangers from time to time is an important part of business and life. The key issue is when someone has made it clear they do not want to be communicated to either directly informing the communicator in question or by broadcasting a general message such as: No Unsolicited Mail.

But what about someone yelling in public space? There are certain ways of interacting with strangers for the first time that will obviously be distressing. I think the answer here is to collectivise public disorder, whether it be someone who wanders around shouting offensive things a strangers or hands out offensive leaflets. If numerous people complain to the police, the policemen should have the power to speak on behalf of the public and tell the person causing the disorder that members of the public have collectively withdrawn their consent to such an unsolicited form of communication. The police should only have the power to press charges if, after giving the warning, the person in question continues to approach and offend strangers. There should also be and expiry date (perhaps a week) after which said person can resume talking to the public until he is warned again – and so on. The expiry date is important, as people’s ability to approach strangers to initiate contact should be reasonably protected. (Harassment mostly only occurs after someone explicitly says: “Leave me alone.”)

Answering a question is never harassment. If you ask someone a question, then you implicitly permit them to answer it in any way that they want.

 

Sharing Personal Information

 

Gossiping is a part of life. If all gossip was forbidden, life would suck. Nevertheless, some private information classes have zero gossip value and, if shared, could expose individuals to physical or financial harm. Such obviously sensitive information is physical location and financial information. To physically assault someone, you first need to know their whereabouts, so publicizing someone’s whereabouts can expose them to harm. The same applies to financial information, or passwords and usernames in general. Email addresses are a grey area. While it is probably best to show discretion, cc-ing people onto small lists (of, say, less than 10) is often an appropriate form of introduction. Nevertheless, if someone explicitly tells you not to share their email address with others, this must be respected. As lists get larger, it becomes increasingly important not to communicate with those on the list in a way that they have not consented to.

 

Communicating At Organized Events and on Private Property

 

If someone walks away from you and you needlessly pester them and get in their face – that’s harassment. But what if many people simultaneously attend an event that they feel they will get value from, and other participants spoil their experience? They may not like what you say, while remaining in the event for other reasons.

Interactive events, question and answers sessions, clubs, conferences, and organizations in general, are a fundamental component of civil society with great importance and value. A place where different people can meet and discuss things with others, where introductions and, perhaps even new friendships, can be made, yet whenever lots of people get together, there will always be the danger of agro. Some participants may take great offence at what others say or do. And if both opponents wish to remain in the venue, or meeting place, things might get nasty.

One solution is to give the organizer total sovereign power to exclude anyone they want from any event they are organising. While such dictatorial power may appear to introduce an inequality between organizer and participant, everyone is free to organize their own events. An event’s size is simply determined by the number of participants who decide to attend. Organizers of large events want people to attend and if they unfairly exclude people, participation levels will drop precipitously. The greatest punishment participants can dole out to an event organizer is to walk out in large numbers. So while giving dictatorial exclusion powers to organizers may seem unjust – competition between different organizations will keep such dictatorial powers in check.

It is worth mentioning that repeated, deliberate physical contact, against the will of the person being contacted at an event, is not the same as speaking to someone against their will and can count as harassment – irrespective of any position taken by the event organizer. Organizers have a responsibility to take reasonable measures to ensure the physical safety of participants.

Beyond that, I would like to add two details: the person who pays for a space (either by owning or renting it) takes precedence over the organizer if they are different people. Say, for example, a group regularly meets in a café, and the person organizing the meeting excludes one attendee, but that attendee remains in the café. If the café owner says they can stay, that decision should supersede that of the meeting organizer. Social networks, where users build up long term value (such as connections to friends or followers), should have complete discretion in setting the policies they adopt. However, once they commit to a policy, they must not exclude members in a manner that violates their own policy. The terms of service should be as binding on the writer of a contract as they are on the readers.

Moderators of comments have a similar level of discretion over which comments they publish.

In a similar way, what if some performer at a venue offends an audience who attended to see someone else? While members of the audience may complain to the venue organizer and while the venue organizer may, at their discretion, exclude the performer, this decision is the sole discretion of the venue organizer. The venue which the organizer creates, can be viewed as a consensual form of communication that participants can choose to accept or reject in totality. Although if attendants bought tickets there might be some cases where they could claim their money back due to false advertising.

There is a case for punishing organizers that consciously oversee venues that systematically incite participants to engage in violence, theft or any other illegal activities. Though, as with the press and harassment, on occasions inciting the public to break the law may serve the public interest (such as if the law is unfair or immoral). Laws against incitement should only apply to physical events and not digital publications, as physically attended events have a greater effect in swaying people’s minds and initiating mob activity.

There are probably some other modifications to the extent that event organizers should be given dictatorial exclusion powers, but this post is long enough as it is.

 

Besides events, there is private property. If you are on someone else’s property, whether residential or commercial (such as a shop), then the owner of that property has the right to communicate with you while you are on their property. Furthermore, the owner can delegate the right to communicate to anyone they wish (such as a shop assistant or security guard who does not own the shop). Broadly speaking, the same principle applies to places of work. The owner of a workplace has the right to communicate with employees who work there, even against their will, so long as they remain on the premises (which they have a right to leave) and to delegate that right to others.

Needless to say, the owners or renters of private property also have the right to expel whoever they want.

This also applies to digital space. Email providers have a right to send emails to accounts that are registered with them (even against the will of users), the same applies to the right of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to send messages to the users of their service through their internal messaging systems (even against the will of users). However, unlike physical venues, digital service providers should not get dictatorial powers to allow other users to send unwelcome messages to each other.

 

Communication In The Workplace

 

The workplace is a special kind of venue, as employees often cannot leave without great financial sacrifice. As such, giving “the venue organizer” (i.e. the boss) total unregulated dictatorial powers of exclusion won’t work, as it is often much harder to find a new job than join a new club. And so competition between workplaces will have less of a moderating influence since the labour market is currently a buyer’s market (hopefully The Countryside Living Allowance  could change that).

On the one hand, sweeping anti-harassment laws would make workplaces totally dysfunctional, toxic environments. If you have agreed to work at a job for money, that implies agreeing to interact with your colleagues professionally. Balancing the law to protect employees from workplace bullying while enabling frank and effective communication, and a workplace environment where people don’t feel they’re in constant danger of getting sued, is a delicate matter which a single blog post cannot disentangle.

 

Libel and Copyright Infringement

 

There is a serious danger that creeping copyright infringement and libel laws could kill free speech and democracy through the death of a thousand cuts. People’s ability to complain, when they – or others – have been abused, swindled or when their neighbourhoods and the planet get damaged, is essential for justice and democracy. Yet this necessarily involves accusing other people of causing harm and damage. Laws that allow individuals to sue for libel and defamation threaten our ability to shine the light on injustices that cause damage and suffering.

The problem with complex laws, that are open to interpretation, is those with money to hire good lawyers usually win. Furthermore, even if complex laws protect someone’s ability accuse someone else, many victims, who do not understand the legal system, may still be intimidated into self-censorship for fear of libel and anti-defamation lawsuits. Without affordable legal advice, they cannot know if they are protected.

Similar problems lurk behind copyright laws. The ability to criticise and quote the works of others is essential to informed political debate. If someone writes a book, makes a film, or has an interview, where false or misleading statements are made, it is important that others can criticise their quotes and set the record straight. Yet if they are not allowed to quote them, for fear of infringing their copyright, this will be impossible. Many documentaries, which draw attention to a range of important human rights and environmental issues, often need footage from a wide variety of sources. Overzealous copyright laws could stifle these works.

We live in an age where everyone and everything is surveilled all the time. There are vast archives of data…but who owns them? If only a tiny subsection of society owns the copyright to most of it, they will have a monopoly privilege to slice and dice it into narratives and propaganda of their choosing to convince anyone of anything while those without copyright may not be able to critique it without getting sued for infringement.

Fair Use legislation is there to defend against this, but it is quite ambiguous and the penalties for falling on the wrong side of it are severe: $30,000 per infringement. It is critical that people become fully aware of the ramifications for justice and democracy if we let Fair Use get chipped away.

This is the problem: Most people go about their daily lives not worrying about copyright. Most don’t consider copyright law or anti-defamation law when they vote in elections. Yet if these laws creep in the wrong direction, they could provide an ideal backdoor route to restrict free speech.

…and yet…

Should someone’s business be ruined because someone else tells a lie (or even reveals an embarrassing truth) about them?

It is right that someone should profit from another’s work without paying the creator a penny?

When it comes to defamation, the issue is complex.

But one way to stop copyright from smothering documentary makers and other creators of compilations would be to only let infringed parties sue for a portion of the profits of works that quotes substantial portions of their creation and to set a floor that guarantees that those who incorporate portions of other people’s work into their work receive at least 50% of their compilation’s  profits. The sum total of aggregate royalties to all parties that sue for copyright infringement in a compilation should never exceed 50% of the net profits derived from the compilation. $30,000 fines for statutory infringement in compilations should be eliminated completely – the danger of destroying freedom of speech, expression and the use of quotes and other source material in informed debate far outweighs the danger of not compensating creators for the value of their creation.

 

The general public needs to pay a lot more attention to legal creep in these critical areas of law before it smothers their free speech entirely. The big problem with “leaving it to the experts” is that rich people and corporations are usually the ones paying experts to lobby to modify these areas of law in ways often at odds with public interest.

 

Misinformation Resulting in Injury

 

While spreading lies and misinformation may not be generically illegal, on occasions when it causes damage to life and property, the legal consequences can be severe. Perjury is a crime that relates to lies in court and the punishment is years behind bars. Beyond that, there is a grey area between giving out damaging financial advice and confidence trickery. Certainly, someone who falsely poses as financial adviser and misrepresents the risk of an investment can face lawsuits from investors who’ve lost millions from the advice, along with fines and imprisonment. Someone whose misinformation on health issues results in a loss of life can face consequence of similar or greater severity.

This all may seem very reasonable, yet sometimes punishing people for spreading damaging misinformation can be problematic. A big issue is health advice. When standard medicine has a tried and trusted cure for an ailment with minimal side effects, going with the treatment prescribed by your GP is a no-brainer. However, for many health conditions, such as cancer, standard treatments are not 100% effective, and even if you follow your GP’s advice you could still die. Many chronic health conditions require continual doses of medicines that are expensive, have dangerous side effects, and reduce people’s quality of life. In cases where the standard treatment for an ailment is unsatisfactory, it is understandable that some people will search the internet for better solutions either in addition to, or in place of, prescribed treatments.

The internet health scene spans the full spectrum from charlatan snake oil salesmen who charge big up front money for non-cures to simple, incredibly helpful, cheap, life changing advice, to terrible advice that is downright dangerous. It is understandable that some people would want to shut it down to protect public health.

…and yet there’s a problem with this…

Existing medicine is strongly biased towards researching new chemical compounds with curative properties as opposed to exploring new (previously unknown) curative properties possessed by existing compounds. This is not the most effective use of resources and has everything to do with patent law. The existing compounds cannot be patented, so systematic research into new curative properties of existing chemical compounds is not, for the most part, profitable.

Yet the long term side effects of injesting compounds that can be found in the food section of the supermarket are far better known than the long term effects of injesting a newly discovered chemical compound. At the very least, chemicals contained in regularly eaten foodstuffs have stood the test of time and have been eaten by billions. Conversely, control trials of new chemical compounds are conducted over shorter periods on smaller groups. These can screen for short-term side effects, but can miss potentially damaging side effects of long term dosage on small, vulnerable portions of the population.

 

You can find hundreds of household cures on the internet. Coconut oil for skin rashes and earaches, garlic for flu, someone even testified that he has successfully used a vibrator to cure a chronic case of haemorrhoids!!! Many of these cures have not been systematically tested in large expensive control trials, principally because they cannot be patented. All we can go on is hearsay and personal stories.

Health bloggers have to be careful about what they say. Even if a given remedy really does have beneficial health effects if it isn’t “authorized” by the medical status quo, due to a lack of evidence from control trials, (which is often due to an absence of control trials due to lack of funding) then if someone tries the remedy and suffers as a result, there could be a danger the health blogger might be held accountable.

In all high-stakes fields (engineering, medicine, mental health) there is a severe bias towards the status quo. Conformity becomes a protective umbrella. It is inevitable that from time to time, people will die, but if you follow the best practice standards in your field and someone dies, then you are not legally accountable. However, once you move away from those standards, you enter a world of personal liability. One might argue that this protects people, but the reverse can also be true. If procedure A is accepted as best practice and kills 10% of patients, and procedure B is not accepted as best practice but only kills 5% of patients, then not following best practice could actually save people. Yet, paradoxically, the physician who follows best practice is legally immune from the consequences of the 10% of his patients that die while the physician that did not follow best practice could be held personally accountable for the 5% of his patients that died – and might be imprisoned for negligence as a result.

Thus, while best practice can prevent standards from slipping it is also a huge obstacle to improvement and deters all but the least risk averse physicians from seeking better treatments to save lives.

We should research new curative properties of existing compounds, such as foods and cosmetics, more systematically, but until more funding for such research is made available, reading about home remedies on the internet might be the best we can do. It is always good to first talk to a GP about a medical problem (which is pretty much what every medical website says to cover their arse). Nevertheless, if the remedy a GP prescribes is not fully effective, people must have the right to seek better remedies (if they so wish) on the internet at their own risk. While others must have the right to give advice, so long as they do not misrepresent their qualifications.

And laws that protect people from damaging misinformation must not expand to the point that they suppress information of uncertain helpfulness. Just because it is uncertain whether something is helpful doesn’t imply it necessarily isn’t.

 

Communication to Organize Activities That Violate the Law

 

Attempts to break the law are illegal even if they fail. And communicating to organize others to break a law can be considered part of an attempt. The key thing is to distinguish between an “attempt” and a “fantasy”, evidence such as the level of detail in the communication (such as serious information gathering and analysis), and the physical activities that accompany it, contribute to distinguishing serious attempts from idle fantasies. But there can be no doubt that, in some cases, communication could be the lion’s share of evidence to confirm that an attempt to break the law was serious. So this is a further class of criminal communication.

 

Final Remarks

 

It is understandable why all forms of censorship concern us. You can only censor others if you are more powerful than they. If you have less power than another, you cannot sensor them however much you might want to, so the ultimate decision about what to censor and what not to censor will always rest in the hands of the most powerful actor (be they a person or an institution). Free communication and the innate power of uncontrolled gossip have historically been deployed to curb the shamelessness and impunity of society’s more powerful members and to limit the abuses they can get away with.

And yet, from the above considerations it seems that we cannot ringfence the absolute freedom of every conceivable form of communication. Some forms of communication can do great damage to others and it seems morally necessary to sometimes regulate them (fraud at the very least). Whenever we say: “I believe in absolute freedom of expression” it must always be qualified by something like “excepted in cases of fraud, copyright infringement, perjury and reputation damage caused by libel.”

But can these exceptions be contained within an impregnable bubble, or will a creep in legislative interpretation enable those in power to incrementally warp and expand the sphere of acceptable censorship to the point of acquiring the de facto ability to censor anything they want?

 

John

 

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Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged With: Censor, Censorship, Communication, Dictatorship, Free, Free Speech, Harassment, Human Rights, Information, John McCone, Libertarian, Message, offensive, Philosophy, Prohibition, Regulations, right, section 127, Sharing, Social Media, Speech, Violence

Geo-Libertarianism: A Peaceful Way To Resolve Territory Disputes At Sea

December 28, 2018 by admin

Historically, the emergence of new frontiers has frequently been accompanied by spates of violence as rivals rush to assert, and defend, new claims. As new frontiers open up in the oceans, the arctic, and in space, does an orderly way exist to peacefully divvy up the rival claims for territory that will surely arise? Given the immense destructive power of modern nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the absence of clear international cyberwarfare norms, and the existential threat posed by a hastily conducted AI arms race, a working solution to this issue has never been more urgent.

Bidding is the obvious peaceful alternative to fighting over the use of scarce resources. When two people bid to against each other to access the labour of other humans, the money should clearly be paid to the person who supplies that labour. Similarly, if a craftsman creates an item of value and puts it up for sale, the proceeds of any auction between rival bidders for that item should go to the manufacturer of that item.

But what if no one created the value that competing interests bid to use? What if it has no rightful owner? There’s only one just answer: if no one created an item of value, then everyone has an equal claim to it.

There would, of course, be no sense for everyone to equally use everything – including things they didn’t want. For the sake of productivity it is far better for the winning bidder, the party with the greatest desire and ability to make use of the resource in question, to have sole access to that resource.

The great insight that Henry George articulated, in his masterpiece Progress and Poverty , was that the inherent equal entitlement of everyone to all natural value could be resolved with the rationale for giving sole access to the winning bidder, with a simple Land Value Tax whose proceeds would be redistributed equally throughout the population.

Henry George’s ideas are the basis of Geo-Libertarianism.

The three basic Geolibertarian principles are:

  • Everyone is entitled to freely help themselves to all abundant natural – and relinquished – resources (i.e. abundant meaning supply exceeds demand at zero price)
  • Everyone is entitled to an equal share of all scarce natural and relinquished resources
  • Everyone is entitled to the full benefit they negotiate for the value of their labour – this includes any increase of value that their labour has added to capital they have negotiated legitimate ownership over ( labour includes effectively managing a company you own ).

Once you grasp that relinquished resources have the same status as natural resources, just as dumpster divers are free to help themselves to trash produced by labour, most concerns  about quantifying the labour mixed with land, disappear. Land with negligible value, whether natural or relinquished, is available to all for a negligible land value tax. The value of improvements, that labour produces, is simply the minimum cost of producing those improvements on abundantly available land (assuming workers on normal salaries produced them). This applies as equally to a house, a factory or a shop as it does to a golf course, a ski slope, a hedge row or any other kind of cultivated land. The land value tax is the yearly payment the state must charge to reduce the sale price of the land to the cost of producing the improvements on it – or a sum high enough to cause some owners of unimproved land to freely give it away, but low enough to ensure there are always takers.

Accusations that libertarians would leave homeless single mothers in the cold to starve are therefore unwarranted as a basic income, paid to rich and poor alike, is consistent with zero income tax. Indeed supporters of land value tax include notable libertarians like Milton Friedman  and Peter Thiel.

Seasteading And Geolibertarianism

 

Gabriel Sheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley and Patrick White/seasteading.org

The most credible and motivatated movement seeking to expand into a new frontier is the seasteading movement. The Seasteading Institute eventually aims to establish new floating nations in international waters. The institute has met with representatives of states as well as engineering firms which build floating structures, such as Blue21 .

In the past, territory was fought over. Since 1945, sovereign territories have mostly, either remained static, or fragmented. The UN consensus seems to be that since war is bad, and since sovereign boundaries are mainly altered through war, the less we try to alter borders, the better. Independence movements have, from time to time, caused sub-regions of countries to establish themselves as independent nations, but very few nations have expanded their borders since World War 2 (with the exception of German reunification). Instead, the general trend has been increasing regional independence and more numerous, smaller, independent nations.

Yet this pattern of establishing new nations through civil war, civil unrest or political activism in unruly regions of existing nations (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Bangladesh, Eritrea, etc.,) offers no guide for dealing with new unclaimed frontiers – especially international waters. As the ocean becomes increasingly valuable due to improvements in underwater mining technology for fossil fuels , and other minerals , as well as open ocean fish farming , OTEC  and off-shore wind , the question of how to divvy up oceanic resources is becoming urgent. We already see disputes over ocean territories developing between nations while existing international conventions for determining sovereign maritime control are hideously tangled and arbitrary.

Seasteads, could test out new ways to achieve a peaceful territorial consensus. Systems which, after ironing out the bugs, could resolve territorial disputes everywhere.

I propose applying geolibertarian principles to new territorial claims in international waters. International waters is particularly suitable for geolibertarianism as it contains little, if any, fixed capital. This reduces the complication of separating land from improvements.

Geolibertarian principles suggest the following approach for establishing sovereignty in international waters:

  • A new seastead informs the UN of its intention to ringfence a patch of oceanic territory
  • The UN announces this intention to all existing nations of the world (including other seasteads) and makes a record of this declaration publicly available to anyone – including other groups who may want to establish their own nation.
  • If no one challenges the territorial claim of the seastead, they get it for free
  • If some party disputes all or part of this claim, the UN conducts an auction where disputing parties bid against each other for control of the territory. Procedures to parcel the disputed territory into different “lots” will have to be worked out by trial and error. Control of each lot goes to the seastead that bid the highest.
  • The parties bid over yearly payments. These payments must be made to the UN in perpetuity unless control of the territory is voluntarily relinquished.
  • No territorial claim to international waters is permanent. It will always be open to challenge. Another seastead, or new entrant, can always challenge an existing seastead’s territory to a bidding contest. If a portion of their claim is challenged, and they are out bid, they must part with that portion of territory. This prevents first movers buying up vast tracts of international waters early on, closing up the frontier, and blocking new entrants. Existing seasteads may have to increase their yearly payments to the UN to defend their claims against new challengers who offer higher bids.
  • Yearly payments to the UN should mostly be redistributed as a per capita payment to all permanent residents of international waters (regardless of their jurisdiction of residency – if any). A small portion of the proceeds should fund the program’s running costs.

 

Bugs and details will, of course, need to be ironed out. Perhaps bidding rules should not allow challengers to bid for a seastead’s maritime heartland before bidding for its borderland. Other issues may also crop up and trial and error will establish norms for good conduct.

This system for resolving disputes should first be beta-tested on tiny disputing seasteads competing over different portions of international waters before a smoothed out, re-purposed version is used to resolve disputes between large nations over exclusive economic zones.

A further benefit is that, by creating an economic incentive to live at sea, a maritime basic income could encourage floating settlements to be built near maritime workers – who mine minerals, manage wind turbines, maintain OTEC systems or run fish farms. This would let their families live nearby and improve their quality of life.

 

Similar bidding systems run by the UN along geolibertarian lines have also been proposed as a means of preventing space wars between rival asteroid mining companies.

 

Future Territory Disputes Could Save, Rather Than Destroy, Lives

 

Needless to say, the effect of applying this system to existing terrestrial sovereign borders would, in most cases, be destabilizing to say the least. The safest way to establish  the sovereign borders of land governments is to stick with the status quo – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Nevertheless, ribbons of disputed territory at the borders of some sovereign nations are already potential flashpoints for future wars, the Golan Heights being one example. A geolibertarian solution (debugged by seasteads) where disputing nations make rival bids of yearly payments to the UN for control of a disputed territory, would be unlikely to worsen these tense situations and may improve them.

The resulting yearly payments to the UN could fund a global universal basic income, which everyone – including inhabitants of the poorest countries – would receive. Arms races already are a kind of bidding contest between combatants, yet the result of this “bidding” is wasteful and destructive, resulting in the trashing of expensive military hardware and human life.

If, instead of trying to out-spend rivals in weaponry, competing countries tried to outspent each other with charity, then, in the future, territorial disputes between nations could save, rather than kill, people.

 

John

 

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Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged With: Geolibertarian, GeoLibertarianism, Libertarian, Seastead

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